War Crimes, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

Subterms

    More stories

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Reckoning With Memories of Budapest

      by

      In early April, when my flight arrived at Ferenc Liszt International Airport, László Borsos was waiting for me at the arrivals gate. I hadn’t seen the man in 28 years. I scanned the crowd and found him standing there with a wild grin on his face, his glasses dangling elegantly over a white collared shirt.After a quick hug, and with a wave of his hand, he gestured for me to hurry along; he was parked just beyond the sliding glass doors. And so, feeling myself slip back into an old habit, I threw my duffel bag over my shoulder, shook my head in disbelief and did what for four years as a child had been part of my daily routine: I followed him outside for a ride through Budapest.Budapest’s Castle District, in the distance, framed through a stained-glass window in the Parliament building.A university student peruses the selection at a small bookshop near the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library.St. Stephen’s Basilica, named after the first King of Hungary.It would be nearly impossible to overstate how dramatically the course of my life changed when my family moved to Hungary in the early 1990s. Both of my parents grew up in Ohio — my mother in a poor corner of Youngstown, and my father in a middle-class neighborhood in the sleepy town of Dover. When I was born in 1985, the last of three children, we lived in a small split-level house in Austintown, a suburb of Youngstown. My dad, one of the few people in my extended family with a college degree, was 11 years into a promising but as-yet unexceptional career as a finance manager at General Electric. Neither of my parents had ventured far from their childhood circumstances.In 1989, though, as political reforms swept through Central and Eastern Europe, General Electric strode into Hungary and purchased a light-bulb manufacturer, Tungsram, then one of the country’s largest and most iconic brands. The acquisition, orchestrated by Jack Welch, made for front-page news — and my dad, riding the wave of a stunning historical moment, accepted an overseas assignment to help introduce capitalist practices to a business with a long-running communist past.My dad, Karl, on the right, with Ferenc Musits, the chief accountant at the Tungsram factory in the city of Nagykanizsa, in the early ’90s.Seated in between my elder siblings, Nicholas and Emelia, in 1994. My mom, Sophia, ever busy behind the scenes (and as a result rarely in front of the camera), took the photo.We arrived in Budapest in the summer of 1990 — with my grandmother improbably in tow — to find our reality entirely transformed. My brother, sister and I were enrolled in an international school, where, unlike in suburban Ohio, our classmates’ nationalities spanned the globe. My parents, who until then had barely left the United States, were soon shepherding us on trips to Krakow, Madrid, Rome. We bought a brand-new Volvo station wagon. And perhaps most lavish of all, which to my parents must have been a comically unfathomable luxury: General Electric hired us a driver — a man named László, who arrived each morning in his impeccably clean Opel Kadett to ferry my siblings and me across the city to our school.László Borsos in April. Hired by General Electric as our private driver in 1990, he now owns and operates his own taxi business. When he learned from my mom that I was traveling to Budapest, he insisted on picking me up at the airport.In the 32 years since then, Hungary has undergone its own dramatic transformation. Once considered the most entrepreneurial and Western-friendly of the former Eastern Bloc nations, it has, of late, become a poster child of nationalism, illiberalism and the erosion of democratic values, offering a political vision that has been emulated in Poland and admired by populist figures in France, Italy and the United States.Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, now the longest serving elected leader in Europe, has steadily consolidated power by rewriting the Constitution, overhauling election laws to favor his Fidesz party, undermining the independence of the courts and bringing most of the country’s media under the control of his political allies. The influence of his autocratic tendencies has also seeped into the country’s civic and cultural life, leading to the expulsion of a liberal university and affecting the leadership and offerings at theaters and museums.I sensed some of the troubling undercurrents within minutes of my arrival, when László, on our drive from the airport, began echoing Kremlin-friendly conspiracies about the war in Ukraine, which have been widely disseminated via the state-owned media and pro-government news outlets.A pro-Ukraine rally, held in late April near the Parliament, drew many hundreds of supporters.A nearby pro-Russia rally, held the same day in Szabadság tér, or Liberty Square, a few hundred feet away, drew a much smaller and less lively crowd — and an unexpected array of flags.Supporters of Mi Hazánk Mozgalom, or Our Homeland Movement, a far-right political party that campaigns on conspiracy theories, homophobia and anti-Roma racism, gathered outside the Ukrainian Embassy in early June. Once a fringe group, the party won parliamentary representation in the national elections held in April.Despite its modest size and economic output (its population, under 10 million, is roughly that of Michigan, and its G.D.P. roughly that of Kansas), Hungary has garnered outsize media attention in recent years because of Mr. Orbán’s self-described illiberal agenda. A number of Western journalists have descended on its capital and returned either with ominous reports about the country’s lurch toward autocracy or with obsequious interviews extolling Mr. Orbán’s conservative values. Meanwhile, amid the steady stream of polarized dispatches, I felt as though my increasingly distant memories and personal impressions of the place were being supplanted by a series of politicized caricatures.And so, earlier this year, after spending much of the pandemic traveling around the United States, I opted to push the limits of remote work and settle for a while in the city where I formed my earliest lasting memories. My hope was that I could retrace certain elements of my childhood, dust off my long-dormant language skills, reconnect with old family friends, assess the city’s political reality and, perhaps most important, get to know the place — learn its rhythms, appreciate its culture, observe the life of everyday Hungarians — from the loftier perch of adulthood.Tram 49 passes in front of the Great Market Hall. Like many of Budapest’s well-known buildings, the hall was built around the time of the country’s millennial celebration in 1896.Inside, customers line up in front of a meat vendor.The market’s airy interior.If Hungary has become the European Union’s most defiant state, then Budapest has become Hungary’s most defiantly liberal enclave — to the extent that short-term visitors to the city might easily miss the signs of a tense political environment.The opposition parties are noisy. Protests are commonplace. In part as a response to the passage of recent anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation, the Budapest Pride march has drawn huge crowds in recent years, and L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly venues are on the rise. Even the existence of progressive community centers — like Auróra, a social hub that offers a bar and a concert venue and has rented office space to N.G.O.s that focus on marginalized groups — suggests a kind of political and intellectual tolerance.And yet behind many of the organizations that are out of step with the ruling party’s politics is a story of instability — regarding funding, legal protection, reputation. According to a 2022 report by the Artistic Freedom Initiative, Hungarian artists and institutions that oppose Fidesz “find it increasingly difficult — and some speculate even futile — to earn state support without yielding to governmental demands and thus compromising their artistic or personal integrity.”Mikszáth Kálmán Square, in District 8, is often crowded with university students in the afternoons and evenings.Kolibri Kávézó, a small artisanal cafe. Famous for its fin-de-siècle coffee houses, Budapest is now home to dozens of trendy third-wave shops.The underground concert venue at Auróra, a social hub that has rented office space to N.G.O.s that focus on marginalized groups.No contemporary portrait of Budapest could overlook its grandeur: its opulent architecture, its stirring public spaces, its many richly appointed interiors. The bathhouses — Gellért in particular, with its Art Nouveau ornamentation and stunningly beautiful tiles — are among the city’s most treasured attractions. (Hungary is rich with thermal water springs; there are 123 in Budapest alone.)Other highlights include the Hungarian State Opera House, which reopened this year after an extensive restoration, and the newly minted Museum of Ethnography, part of an ambitious development project — opposed by local politicians — to transform Budapest’s main park into a must-visit cultural hub for tourists and locals.Two of the thermal pools at Gellért. To the right, just through the archway, is a cold plunge pool and a steam room.The main hall of the opera house during a performance of “Mefistofele” in late April. The chandelier, which weighs more than three tons, illuminates a fresco by the German-Hungarian painter Károly Lotz.Concertgoers during an intermission.The swooping lines of the new Museum of Ethnography, which opened in May. (The museum was previously housed in a building opposite the Parliament.)Working New York hours in Central Europe meant that my days were largely free until 3 p.m. (after which I worked until around 11 p.m.), leaving me with an abundance of time in the mornings and early afternoons to explore the city.Some days I spent in single-minded pursuit of specific artists: the architectural splendors of Ödön Lechner, whose work has come to define the Hungarian Secession movement, a localized expression of Art Nouveau; or the mosaics and stained-glass art of Miksa Róth, whose legacy is scattered throughout the city.The Royal Postal Savings Bank, which opened in the early 1900s, is one of Ödön Lechner’s masterworks. Now home to the Hungarian State Treasury, the building showcases a range of Hungarian folk motifs — though the striking details on the roof are largely hidden from view at street level. (When a contemporary pointed this out, Lechner is rumored to have said, “The birds will see them.”)The Hungarian Institute of Geology, another of Lechner’s designs.Inside the Institute of Geology. The mosaics and fossil-like sculptural forms were designed to evoke the interior of a cave.Other days I spent roaming more freely, poking my head into the charming courtyards of unassuming residential buildings or visiting with former teachers and old family friends.Exploring America’s National ParksThe glories of the U.S. national park system draw hundreds of millions of visitors each year.Hidden Gems: These days, serenity in nature can be elusive. But even the most popular parks have overlooked treasures.The Less-Traveled Road: When it comes to America’s national parks, it’s not all about Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. Try these lesser-known options.Ready for an Adventure: Not sure what to bring with you on your trip to a national park? Here is a list of essential gear, and these are the best apps to download.National Park Booking App: Traveler and travel industry frustration is growing with Recreation.gov, the online portal to book federal land accommodations and access.On rambles through familiar places, I felt the nostalgic potency of long-ago memories bubbling up to the surface: Here was the apartment building where Balázs Szokolay, our beloved piano teacher, lived with his mother, a sculptor. Here was our school, where, during the Persian Gulf war, the Hungarian police stationed armed guards at the gate. Here was the park where, when curiosity got the best of him, my brother ignited his shoelace with a match.In the afternoons, my feet sore from walking, I often settled in to work at a cafe or at one of the city’s many publicly accessible (and unexpectedly resplendent) libraries.Two neighbors chat in the interior of a residential building in District 8.The interior courtyard of a residential building in District 5, near Szabadság tér, or Liberty Square.A study room inside the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library.The library inside the Hungarian Parliament building.My favorite pastime, though, was meandering through Budapest’s grand cemeteries: Kerepesi in District 8, Farkasréti in District 12, Kozma Street in District 10. All three lie outside the popular tourist zones, which meant that, coming and going, I came to appreciate a broader swath of the city.I found that the cemeteries, filled with gorgeous statues from a range of eras, some exhibiting elements of Socialist Realism and others classically suggestive of the life’s work of the people buried beneath them, were microcosms of Budapest itself: trimmed and stately in their well-trafficked stretches, and unkempt at their fringes.The grave of Lujza Blaha, a Hungarian actress known as “the nation’s nightingale,” at Kerepesi Cemetery, the burial grounds for some of Hungary’s most famous figures — from sculptors and scientists to poets and politicians.An ill-kept grave in the far reaches of Kerepesi. The cemetery is a microcosm of Budapest: trimmed and stately in its well-trafficked stretches, and unkempt at its fringes.The Schmidl Mausoleum, built in the early 1900s for Sándor and Róza Schmidl, is a magnificent example of Hungary’s Jewish funerary art.It was the small, quiet moments that I savored the most: at first strolling past, then waving at, then eventually stopping to meet Erika Bajkó, who ran a small dog-grooming business around the corner from my apartment near Rákóczi Square; glancing up at the domed ceiling inside the entranceway to Széchenyi Baths; making an emotionally charged pilgrimage to my old home in Törökvész, a neighborhood in the Buda hills; joining the evening crowds at the middle of the Szabadság híd, or Liberty Bridge, where the heavy winds over the Danube helped wash away the late-spring and early-summer heat; studying the poetry of Miklós Radnóti, a celebrated Hungarian writer who was murdered in the Holocaust, as I wandered through the neighborhood where he lived.A woman walks two dogs past a groomer, Dog Diva, near Rákóczi Square.The dome in the entrance hall at Széchenyi Baths.An evening crowd gathers at the middle of the Szabadság híd, or Liberty Bridge.“I cannot know what this landscape means to others,” begins what is perhaps Mr. Radnóti’s most famous poem, completed less than a year before his death in 1944. Touching on themes of patriotism, foreign perception and national identity, it offers an instructive comparison of the appreciations of the land by the native-born poet and a passing enemy airman:Through his binoculars he sees the factory and the fields,but I see the worker who trembles for his toil,the forest, the whistling orchard, the grapes and graves,among the graves a grandma, weeping softly,and what from above is a railway or factory to be destroyedis just a watchman’s house; the watchman stands outsideholding a red flag, surrounded by several children,and in the courtyard of the factories a sheepdog frolics;and there’s the park with footprints of past loves …If you want to truly know this place, he seems to be telling us, then be attuned to its details, its people, the joy and suffering hidden in its everyday moments.A statue of Miklós Radnóti in Újlipótváros, or New Leopold Town.The Memorial of the Hungarian Jewish Martyrs, in the courtyard behind the the Dohány Street Synagogue. By the end of the Holocaust, some 565,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered.A small crowd of tourists watches the sun set over the Danube River from an overlook on Gellért Hill.At Öcsi Étkezde, a small restaurant recommended to me by Tas Tobias, whose website, Offbeat Budapest, highlights the city from a local’s perspective, I earned my first Magyar nickname: Pityu, a diminutive of István, the Hungarian form of Stephen.Charmed by my attempts to order from a menu that lacked any hint of English, Erzsébet Varga, the chef, balked at my choice of two dishes containing pickled vegetables — they wouldn’t sit well in my stomach, one of the regulars explained with a laugh — and instead delivered the most delicious bowl of goulash I’d find anywhere on my trip.A group of regulars gathers for lunch at Öcsi Étkezde, a small restaurant in the outer part of District 8.A bowl of goulash sits beside a basket of bread and a handwritten menu, which changes daily.Ferenc Oláh, who runs the restaurant with Erzsébet Varga, his wife, holds up a picture of him and his father, who was also a restaurateur.Ferenc and Erzsébet in the restaurant’s kitchen. As with traditional diners in America, Budapest’s authentic étkezdes, once ubiquitous, are slowly vanishing, giving way to trendier cafes that cater to younger crowds.And yet, as the weeks went by, I found it increasingly difficult to overlook Hungary’s political backdrop. Nearly all of the young people I met in Budapest expressed a nagging malaise about their country’s future. A few, of course, supported the ruling party, but most were vehemently opposed. Many had friends who, noting the political headwinds and a relative lack of economic opportunity, had departed for Paris, London, Vienna. Others were sticking it out, though the landslide victory by Fidesz in the elections in April — despite an unlikely coalition made up of wildly divergent opposition parties — left them with a gnawing sense of hopelessness.Heroes’ Square, which serves as a gateway to Városliget, or City Park, seen before, during and after sunset. (I learned to roller-blade here in the early ’90s.)In mid-May I met András Török, a Budapest-born writer and city historian, at a colorful cafe in Lipótváros, or Leopold Town, a historic neighborhood in the center of the city. His guidebook, “Budapest: A Critical Guide,” updated regularly since it was first published in 1989, is as playful as it is insightful and had helped me reacquaint myself with the city. (Another project he manages, Fortepan, which was founded by Miklós Tamási, offers a staggeringly rich collection of old Hungarian photographs.)We spoke briefly about the optimism many locals had experienced in the late ’80s and early ’90s — “Suddenly the color of ink I used in my fountain pen, which I ceremoniously bought in Vienna every year, was available in the corner shop,” he said wistfully — before turning to present-day concerns.“The victory by Fidesz was so devastating that it’s obvious people want this system,” he said. “It’s an epoch in Hungarian history now,” he added, referring to Mr. Orbán’s tenure.As a response, he said, many of those disheartened by the ruling party have taken an inward turn. “I cultivate my own garden; I write my books,” Mr. Török, who is 68, said. “I talk to my grandchildren and to my friends — and I try to enjoy my life.”“And,” he added, “I accept that I will never in my lifetime see the Hungary I’d like to see.”András Török near a park in Lipótváros, or Leopold Town. His guidebook, “Budapest: A Critical Guide,” is a playful and insightful introduction to the city.Of course, supporters of Mr. Orbán’s, a minority in Budapest but a majority in Hungary overall, don’t express the same pessimism. At the Ecseri Piac, a flea market in the city’s Kispest district — where, during my childhood, I marveled at the overwhelming assemblage of Soviet memorabilia — I met Erika Román, who was selling a range of textiles. Declaring her ardent support for Mr. Orbán, she explained that “Hungary is a little country,” and that “Hungary is for Hungarians.”Behind that sentiment, which is widely popular throughout the country, lies the belief that true Hungarian identity — threatened by globalist progressives and immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, whom Mr. Orbán considers to be existential threats to the European way of life — is inextricably bound with race and religion.“There are more people living in New York City than in the entire country of Hungary,” the conservative writer Rod Dreher points out in a recent article, “which is partly why the Hungarians are so anxious about being assimilated out of existence.”A row of shops at Ecseri Piac, a flea market in the city’s Kispest district.Erika Román, a vendor at the market. “Hungary is a little country,” she told me after expressing her support for Viktor Orbán. “And Hungary is for Hungarians.”The more I reflected on Hungary’s autocratic turn, the more I was haunted by something Mr. Török mentioned during our digressive conversation in May.To experience Hungary’s transformation from totalitarianism to free democracy in the late ’80s and early ’90s, he said, was a wonderful thing. “Earlier I’d thought that I had been born at the wrong time,” he said. “But then I realized: Oh! I was born at the right time after all!”A home video taken in 1992 shows the condition of Mátyás-templom, or Matthias Church, in the heart of the Castle District.And yet he had “a sort of secret fear in the back of my mind,” he said, that the transformation had happened entirely too quickly — so quickly, as others have argued, that Hungarians, having lived for 40 years behind the Iron Curtain, weren’t given enough time to appreciate or internalize their rights and responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.“We seemed to have been given a free lunch by Gorbachev and Reagan,” he said. “And I think we are learning now, somehow, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.”Matthias Church in early May. Over the course of its eclectic history, the building has seen the crowning of Hungarian kings and served for 150 years — during the Ottoman occupation — as a mosque.A building project in the Castle District. Efforts to restore and reconstruct certain historic buildings are aimed at drawing more tourists and creating an expression of Mr. Orbán’s brand of nationalism.The roof of Matthias Church. The tiles were made by Hungary’s celebrated Zsolnay porcelain factory, which also supplied tiles for the Parliament building, the Gellért baths and several buildings designed by the renowned Hungarian architect Ödön Lechner — including the two buildings, the Royal Postal Savings Bank and the Hungarian Institute of Geology, shown earlier in this essay.How much, I began to wonder, had General Electric’s quick entry into Eastern Bloc markets — which, despite high hopes, quickly led to labor tensions and slashed payrolls and ultimately proved to be more fraught than expected — helped hasten Hungary’s too-rapid transformation? How much had the frenzied reach of American capitalism helped set the stage for Mr. Orbán’s rise?How much, I wondered, had that earlier tide of history helped shape today’s?The crumbling entrance to a Tungsram site in Budapest, photographed in late May. Tungsram, which was finally sold by General Electric in 2018, filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year.In late May, I caught wind — through 444.hu, a self-consciously edgy news site, and, alongside Telex and HVG, one of Hungary’s few remaining independent outlets — that a sprawling field of poppies had bloomed in District 15, near the edge of the city. I hopped on a bus for the 40-minute ride, gazing out the window as we wended our way through timeworn residential areas and past Soviet-era panel housing estates.Exiting the bus near a discount grocery store, I looked out across its parking lot and saw a vast sea of brilliant red petals that stretched for half a mile toward the M3 motorway.A field of poppies that bloomed on the outskirts of Budapest, at the edge of in District 15, in May.The immense field, within city limits, sat just beside a set of residential towers.A bee drifts toward a flower to collect pollen.The flowers, of course, weren’t long for this world — merely a momentary splash of vibrancy in Budapest’s weary periphery. Nor was the field itself destined to last: It would soon be paved to make room for a housing development.How fitting, I thought, since transience, in the end, was one of Hungary’s abiding lessons. After my family moved back to Ohio, where the homogeneous suburban scene accentuated the richness of the culture we’d left behind, I learned that the only constant I could rely on was the promise of constant change. So much simply faded away. My parents divorced. My international-school friends scattered like seeds. My grandmother was withered by cancer. In time, Tungsram would decay, as would General Electric, as would the influence of Western liberalism.But Budapest, in my memory, stands like a land before time. No doubt that’s why I feel such a connection to the place. No doubt that’s why it feels like home.With my grandmother, Natalie Faunda, on Margaret Island — which sits in the middle of the Danube River, between Buda and Pest — in 1990.My family at an overlook on Gellért Hill in ’92 or ’93.Standing on the outskirts of Budapest, watching the poppies dance in the wind and contemplating the ephemerality of this age-old city, I was reminded of a quote from Péter Molnár Gál, a Hungarian critic, that I’d read in Mr. Török’s guidebook.“In Budapest,” he writes, “you can’t dunk your bread in the same sauce twice. The city is going through a time of transition. As it has been doing for five hundred years.”By then, I think, wrestling with the past and the present, I’d begun to see the central question about Hungary’s future as one that posits pessimism and optimism as equally naïve: If the historical tides of the last 30 years are anything of a guide, then how could we ever hope to know what the next tide will bring?The Buda Castle after nightfall.Stephen Hiltner is an editor and photojournalist on The New York Times’s Travel desk, where he edits and contributes to the weekly World Through a Lens column. His last essay was about a kayaking trip through Florida’s Everglades. You can follow his work on Instagram and Twitter.Got a question, comment or tip? Send him an email or drop a note in the comments section.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list for 2022. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Phyo Zeya Thaw, Burmese Pro-democracy Rapper, 41, Is Executed

      by

      The hip-hop star became a democracy activist in military-ruled Myanmar, and then a lawmaker. After the latest military coup, he joined the resistance, and was hanged for it.U Phyo Zeya Thaw, a Burmese hip-hop pioneer whose democracy-affirming lyrics led to a career in Parliament and, after Myanmar’s military coup last year, as a resistance leader, was executed on Saturday in Yangon, Myanmar, by the country’s military junta. He was 41.His execution, and those of three other political prisoners, were announced in the junta-controlled news media on Monday. His mother, Daw Khin Win May, confirmed his death.The four men were convicted of terrorism charges in trials widely denounced as a sham. The four executions, including that of the veteran democracy activist U Kyaw Min Yu, popularly known as Ko Jimmy, were the first to be carried out in decades in Myanmar.Since the junta seized power last year from a civilian government, it has killed more than 2,100 civilians and arrested 14,800, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a monitoring group. Large swaths of the country are in open rebellion, with civilian militias defending against military incursions and launching occasional raids on army bases.Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw, already well known as a democracy activist, led an underground resistance cell in Yangon, Myanmar’s commercial capital. Many such civilian militias, loosely grouped together as the People’s Defense Force, are led by ousted legislators, pro-democracy activists and even the occasional doctor or lawyer.After Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw was arrested on terrorism charges last November, the authorities released a photo of him surrounded by weapons that they said he had been planning to use to kill members of the military forces.His defenders disputed the authenticity of the photo. Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw’s face in the photo was visibly bruised and puffy.“I laughed when I saw the weapons in the picture,” said Ma Thazin Nyunt Aung, Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw’s fiancée, who said she had been with him when he was arrested. “The military council is an organization that is never trusted because it never tells the truth.”Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw, who was commonly known as Zayar Thaw (pronounced zay-yahr thaw), was adept at career makeovers.Toward the end of the military’s first round of iron-fisted rule, in the early 2000s, he fronted one of Myanmar’s first hip-hop groups and co-founded Generation Wave, a collective of rappers, activists and other young people who used music as a medium of dissent.“With hip-hop, we can express ourselves without fear,” Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw said in a 2011 interview, shortly after he was released from his first stint in prison. “Music can make us brave.”As the ruling generals began to open up the country and allow members of the long oppressed National League for Democracy to run for Parliament in a 2012 by-election, Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw reinvented himself as a politician, trading his baggy hip-hop outfits for the demure shirt and sarong of the political class. His sideways baseball cap gave way to a neat hairdo worthy of a business executive.He won a seat in Parliament for the N.L.D., the party of the democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.His was a rare young face in a political party whose stalwarts had grown old battling the military generals who had ruled Myanmar for nearly five decades, a period of international isolation and destruction.“I was just an activist who rebelled against injustice,” Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw said shortly after his electoral victory. “When I was in prison, I thought seriously about what I wanted. I wanted to end injustice, so I joined the N.L.D.”He grew close to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, traveling overseas with her and soothing her often cranky dog.“He is almost like a son to her,” U Win Htein, a now-imprisoned N.L.D. elder, said of Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw in 2019. “He is very obedient. He believes in her, and she believes in him.”Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who rose to de facto leader of Myanmar after elections in 2015 and 2020, is also imprisoned and has been convicted of crimes that Western governments and human rights groups say are trumped up.Phyo Zeya Thaw was born on March 26, 1981, in Yangon. His father was a rector of a dental school, and his mother was a dentist. In ninth grade, he told his parents that he wanted to become an artist. They encouraged him to pursue more traditional studies.A year later, he informed his mother, Ms. Khin Win May, that he wanted to become a D.J.“I asked him to explain what a D.J. is,” she said. He obliged.She survives him, along with his father, U Mya Thaw; his sister, Daw Phyu Pa Pa Thaw; and his fiancée, Ms. Thazin Nyunt Aung.Myanmar was then one of the most closed countries on earth, moldering under the generals’ inept rule. The military secret police terrorized the population. Listening to foreign radio broadcasts or holding foreign currency could result in long prison sentences.While completing his university studies in English, Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw opened a recording studio and began to form Myanmar’s first major hip-hop band. The band was called Acid, and his music name was Nitric Acid.In 2007, amid rising fuel prices and yet another economic crisis, Buddhist monks led mass protests in Yangon and other cities, overturning their alms bowls to signal disenchantment with the military junta. Young protesters syncopated their rebellion with local hip-hop.As it had with previous mass demonstrations, the military ultimately responded with gunfire. Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw then co-founded Generation Wave, a secret band of anti-government hip-hoppers and youth activists.He was arrested in 2008 and convicted of violating a law-and-order statute and of illegally possessing the equivalent of about $20 in foreign currency.After his release from prison in 2011, he still performed at occasional gigs, but he began to focus on promoting the National League for Democracy.With the military agreeing to power-sharing with a civilian authority, he was elected to Parliament in 2012 and re-elected in 2015, this time to represent a district in Naypyidaw, the capital built by the generals early this century to replace Yangon. The military-linked party was shocked by its defeat on home turf.Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw busied himself as an assistant to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, helping to prepare briefing papers on legislation and peace talks with ethnic minority rebels. He remained loyal, even as she earned international condemnation for her support of the military when it unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims.During parliamentary season in Naypyidaw, Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw lived in an austere concrete dormitory for legislators, his room outfitted with little more than a hard bed with a mosquito net and a table piled high with legislative paperwork. There was little evidence of his life as one of Myanmar’s most renowned hip-hop artists.“He liked singing more than politics,” said Ms. Thazin Nyunt Aung, his fiancée. “But he did his duty to the end.”Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw declined to run for re-election in 2020, hoping to return to rap. The National League for Democracy won an even bigger margin of victory that year. The military-aligned party was mortified.The putsch came less than three months later, and the country’s top leaders were quickly rounded up and imprisoned.When mass protests against the new junta spilled onto the streets, Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw joined the rallies. But with soldiers killing unarmed protesters with single shots to the head, even targeting small children, he and others went underground.His activities in the resistance are not publicly known. He was arrested in November when 300 soldiers descended on the Yangon housing project where he was in hiding.The military accused the four men executed on Saturday of being responsible for the deaths of at least 50 civilians, as well as soldiers, but it has not publicly presented any evidence of that.In January, the junta’s court sentenced Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw and the three other activists to death.“These death sentences, handed down by an illegitimate court of an illegitimate junta, are a vile attempt at instilling fear among the people of Myanmar,” the United Nations said in a statement.Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw was hanged before dawn on Saturday, along with the three other democracy activists.“I will always be proud of my son because he gave his life for the country,” Ms. Khin Win May said. “He is the martyr who tried to bring democracy to Myanmar.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Babi Yar: Context’ Review: Unearthing Footage of a Nazi Massacre

      by

      Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary, about the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews in 1941, arrives in theaters with a grim context of its own.Over two days in September, 1941, German soldiers, assisted by Ukrainian collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine outside Kyiv. The massacre was one of the earliest and deadliest episodes in what is sometimes called the “holocaust by bullets,” a phase of the Nazi genocide that took place outside the mechanized slaughter of the death camps. These mobile killing squads, known as Einsatzgruppen, are estimated to have taken at least 1.5 million lives.The Ukrainian-born filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary, consisting of archival footage interspersed with a few tersely informative title cards, is called “Babi Yar: Context.” What’s meant by “context” isn’t so much a broad, explanation of the event — such as one finds in the historian Timothy Snyder’s book “Bloodlands” — as a detailed visual narrative with a hole in the middle.When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, they brought movie cameras as well as rifles. So did the Soviet Army when it took back Kyiv in 1943. Some of those cameras were instruments of propaganda; others were wielded by amateurs. The two sides left behind an extensive cinematic record, a pool of images that have mostly languished unseen since the end of the war. Weaving them together and dubbing in sound (the rumble of tanks and the murmur of crowds, with an occasional snippet of intelligible speech), Loznitsa has assembled a wrenching and revelatory collage.The killing itself took place off camera. What is astonishing is how thoroughly nearly everything that happened before and after the massacre was documented, in black-and-white and sometimes in color. The detail is unsparing and relentless: farms and villages set on fire by German soldiers; Jews being rounded up, humiliated and beaten; snowy fields strewn with frozen corpses; bombs exploding in downtown Kyiv; the public hanging of 12 Germans convicted of atrocities after the war.Though there is a military and political narrative to be gleaned from all of this, Loznitsa’s method (displayed in earlier found-footage films like “State Funeral,” about the aftermath of Stalin’s death) is to allow the human reality to speak for itself. A few prominent officials are identified — you may recognize Nikita S. Khrushchev, who became the leader of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic soon after the Germans were driven out — but what the film displays most vividly is the intense individuality of anonymous, ordinary people. History is a catalog of faces: city-dwellers and peasants; victims, perpetrators and bystanders; Germans, Jews, Russians and Ukrainians.Mostly, these people don’t speak. Toward the end, there are scenes of courtroom testimony, during which a German soldier and several witnesses and survivors talk about what happened at Babi Yar. Their words, in the absence of images, have a harrowing intensity beyond what any pictures might convey. So does the Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman’s 1943 essay “Ukraine Without Jews,” quoted onscreen to emphasize the enormity of what can’t be shown.Much of the rest of “Babi Yar: Context” works the other way around, finding an eloquence in actions and gestures that words might not supply. And also an element of indeterminacy, as you try to read the thoughts and feelings on those faces.There is a political, moral dimension to the work of interpretation that Loznitsa compels. After Kyiv, other cities like Lviv fall to the Germans; the streets fill with Ukrainians celebrating their victory as liberation from Soviet oppression. Girls in traditional costumes present bouquets of flowers to Nazi officers, and banners are hoisted proclaiming the glory of Adolf Hitler and the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. When Jews are rounded up, harassed and brutalized, local civilians are on hand to participate.Later, there are parades and flowers to welcome the Red Army. Hitler’s likeness is taken down and replaced with Stalin’s. You might wonder about the composition of the crowds. Did some of the same people who welcomed the German army as liberators also turn out to support the Soviet army’s return? Did residents of Kyiv who cheered the arrival of Nazi fighters also cheer their execution?Forcing you to think about these questions is one of the ways Loznitsa’s film draws you closer to the horror at its center, stripping away the easy judgment of hindsight as well as the layers of forgetting and distortion that accumulated around the massacre in subsequent decades.And of course “Babi Yar: Context,” completed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, arrives in theaters with a grim context of its own. The Babi Yar Memorial near Kyiv was damaged in early March by a Russian missile. Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has claimed that one of his goals is the “denazification” of Ukraine, whose current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. The past that Loznitsa excavates casts its shadow on the present. Knowing about it won’t make anything easier, but not knowing can make everything worse.Babi Yar: ContextNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Whoopi Goldberg Apologizes for Saying Holocaust Was ‘Not About Race’

      by

      Ms. Goldberg’s comments, on Monday’s episode of “The View,” came amid growing ignorance about the Holocaust and rising antisemitism.Whoopi Goldberg, the comedian and actress who is also a co-host of the ABC talk show “The View,” said repeatedly during an episode of the show that aired on Monday that the Holocaust was not about race, comments that come at a time of rising antisemitism globally. She later apologized.In the episode, Ms. Goldberg said the Holocaust was about “man’s inhumanity to man” and “not about race.” When one of her co-hosts challenged that assertion, saying the Holocaust was driven by white supremacy, Ms. Goldberg said: “But these are two white groups of people.”She added, “This is white people doing it to white people, so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.” As she continued to speak, music came on, indicating a commercial break.There was a fierce backlash. Jewish groups said Ms. Goldberg’s comments were dangerous and the latest example of growing ignorance about the Nazi genocide. During World War II, under a policy of mass extermination, the Nazis killed six million Jews — about a third of the world’s Jewish population at the time — because they believed Jews were an inferior race.Later Monday, Ms. Goldberg appeared on Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” where she apologized, explaining that, as a Black person, she thinks of racism as being based on skin color but that she realized not everyone sees it that way. “I get it. Folks are angry,” she said. “I accept that, and I did it to myself.”She apologized again on Tuesday at the start of “The View.” She expressed remorse over her remarks, saying she realized that they were misinformed and that she had misspoken.“I said something that I feel a responsibility for not leaving unexamined because my words upset so many people, which was never my intention,” Ms. Goldberg said. “And I understand why now, and for that I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful and helped me understand some different things.”On Monday, Ms. Goldberg had been discussing a Tennessee school district’s recent decision to remove a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust from its curriculum when she made her initial comments on Monday’s episode. On Monday night, she released a statement apologizing for them. On Tuesday, she said that she had learned from the experience.“It is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race,” she said. “Now, words matter, and mine are no exception. I regret my comments, as I said, and I stand corrected. I also stand with the Jewish people, as they know and y’all know because I’ve always done that.”During an appearance on the show on Tuesday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said it was critical to combat hate and misinformation about the Holocaust.“The Holocaust happened and we need to learn from this genocide if we want to prevent future tragedies from happening,” Mr. Greenblatt said.Mr. Greenblatt suggested that “The View” should consider adding a Jewish host to its panel.“Think about having a Jewish host on this show who can bring these issues of antisemitism, who can bring these issues of representation to ‘The View’ every single day,” he said.Ms. Goldberg, 66, did not mention having a Jewish background, as she has in the past. She has said in interviews that she does not practice any religion but identifies as Jewish and adopted her distinctive stage name partly because of that. She was born Caryn Johnson.In 1994, Ms. Goldberg mentioned her ties to Judaism in an interview with The Orlando Sentinel, after the Anti-Defamation League criticized a recipe that she contributed to a charity cookbook for “Jewish American princess fried chicken.” The title was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, she said.“I am a Jewish-American princess,” she told the newspaper. “That’s probably what bothers people most. It’s not my problem people are uncomfortable with the fact that I’m Jewish.”This week, the criticism of Ms. Goldberg’s remarks was intense. Before he was invited onto “The View,” Mr. Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League wrote on Twitter: “No @WhoopiGoldberg, the #Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race. They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering 6 million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous.”And Mrs. Goldberg’s former co-host, Meghan McCain, said on Twitter on Monday that antisemitism was “a poison that is increasingly excused in our culture and television — and permeates in spaces that should shock us all.”According to a 2014 report by the Anti-Defamation League, more than one billion people globally hold antisemitic views. More than a third of people in the 102 countries polled had never heard of the Holocaust, the report found.Jewish communities around the world have indicated an increase in annual antisemitic incidents, according to research by the Anti-Defamation League. That feeling is pronounced in Europe, where 89 percent of Jews felt that antisemitism in their countries had increased between 2013 and 2018, according to a 2018 European Union survey of about 16,500 Jewish people.The survey also found that 40 percent of European Jews worried about being physically attacked, and across 12 E.U. countries where Jews have been living for centuries, more than a third said they were considering emigrating because they no longer felt safe as Jews.Last month, the United Nations adopted a resolution that condemns denial and distortion of the Holocaust. Ms. Goldberg’s comments also came weeks after a gunman held several people hostage at a Texas synagogue for 11 hours.David Baddiel, a British comedian and the author of the book “Jews Don’t Count,” said in an interview that antisemitism has very little to do with religion itself — descendants of Jewish people who had converted to Christianity were also killed in the Holocaust because they were viewed as members of the Jewish race.“If you are a race, an ethnicity, as Jews are, that have suffered persecution over many, many centuries, principally because that happens to be who you are, happens to be who your parents are, happens to be who your ancestors are, then that is racism,” Mr. Baddiel said.“There is no other word for it.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Jasmila Zbanic Is Vilified in Serbia and ‘Disobedient’ at Home

      by

      Jasmila Zbanic, named Europe’s best director for “Quo Vadis, Aida?”, insists on blaming individuals, not ethnic groups, for atrocities done as Yugoslavia imploded, a stance that can anger all sides.SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — A celebrated Bosnian film director always knew her latest movie, the harrowing drama of a mother trying unsuccessfully to save her husband and two sons from the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, would be panned by Serb nationalists.But the filmmaker, Jasmila Zbanic, was still taken aback when Serbian media invited a convicted war criminal to opine on the movie, “Quo Vadis, Aida?”, for which she recently won Europe’s best director award.The chosen critic? Veselin Sljivancanin, a former Yugoslav army officer sentenced to prison by a tribunal in The Hague for aiding and abetting the murder of prisoners in Croatia in the Vukovar massacre.While asking such a notorious figure to comment on the movie was a surprise, his reaction to it wasn’t: He denounced it as lies that “incite ethnic hatred” and smear all Serbs.“He, a war criminal, wants all Serbs, most of whom had nothing to do with his crimes, to feel attacked for his crimes,” Ms. Zbanic said in a recent interview at her production company atop a hill overlooking Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. “He is putting his guilt on all Serbs.”Ms. Zbanic speaking after the first public showing of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” in 2020 in Srebrenica, where some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in 1995.Kemal Softic/Associated PressMs. Zbanic’s unwavering belief that the guilt for the atrocities committed as the former Yugoslavia split apart belongs to individuals, not ethnic groups, has also made her a difficult cultural icon for some in her own community of Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks, to embrace.When the European Film Academy last month gave her the award of best director and selected “Quo Vadis, Aida?” as Europe’s best film of the year, a few Bosniak politicians congratulated her on their personal Facebook pages, but there were no official celebrations of the kind held whenever Bosniak athletes triumph abroad.“I did not even get any flowers,” she said.Fiercely independent and a self-declared feminist, Ms. Zbanic has for years kept her distance from Bosnia’s dominant and male-dominated political force, the Party of Democratic Action, or S.D.A., a Bosniak nationalist group. Like Serb parties on the other side of the ethnic divide, the S.D.A. now wins votes by stirring animosity toward, and fear of, other groups.“I’m very much against S.D.A., the main political party, so they know I am not theirs,” she said, noting that she had several times selected ethnic Serb actors for starring roles in her movies. “I don’t choose actors because of their nationality but because they are the best,” she said.In her most recent movie, the main role, a Bosniak translator working for the United Nations in Srebrenica, is played by Jasna Djuricic from Serbia. Ms. Djuricic, who won the best actress award from the European Film Academy, has been pilloried in Serb media as a Muslim-loving traitor.The actress Jasna Djuricic, left, with Ms. Zbanic on the set of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” Ms. Djuricic has been called a traitor in her native Serbia.Imrana Kapetanovic/DeblokadaHaris Pasovic, a prominent Bosnian theater director and Ms. Zbanic’s professor during the war years at the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts, said his former student’s collaboration with the Serbian actress demonstrated her faith that culture transcends nationalism.“Events were meant to separate these two people forever, but they came together to create this incredible work of art,” Mr. Pasovic said.International acclaim, he added, has made Ms. Zbanic “the most successful woman in Bosnian history” and, as a result, “she terrifies Balkan politicians,” nearly all men. “She is very careful not to be used in Balkan political trading and has never wanted to be part of anybody’s bloc,” Mr. Pasovic said.Bosnia has a long, rich history of filmmaking from when it was still part of Yugoslavia, the multiethnic socialist state that fell apart in the early 1990s and spawned Europe’s bloodiest armed conflict since World War II. More than 140,000 died in the ensuing conflicts.“What I learned during the war is that food and culture are equal,” Ms. Zbanic said. “You can’t live without either.”Like so much else in Bosnia, a patchwork of different ethnic groups and religions, the film industry has been left bitterly divided by the traumas of war. Emir Kusturica, a well-known Sarajevo-born director who has embraced Serb nationalism, is now reviled by many Bosniaks as a champion of “Greater Serbia,” the cause that tore Bosnia apart in the 1990s.Ms. Zbanic, 47, said she despised Mr. Kusturica’s politics — he is close to Milorad Dodik, the belligerent nationalist leader of Bosnia’s Serb-controlled region — but still respected his talents. “We should appreciate professionals no matter what ideology they have,” she said.Seventeen years old when Bosnian Serbs began a nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo in 1992, Ms. Zbanic said her films, which include “Grbavica,” a 2006 feature about a single mother whose daughter was conceived in a wartime rape, are her “attempt to understand what happened and how what happened during the war is still influencing our everyday life.”Ms. Zbanic speaking to cast members on the set of “Quo Vadis, Aida?”Imrana Kapetanovic/Deblokada“Grbavica” helped pressure Bosnian politicians into changing the law to give previously neglected wartime rape victims the same official recognition and allowances as former soldiers. She counts that as one of her proudest achievements, noting that “truth is always good, even if it is painful and even if it hurts, it moves things forward.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      In ‘Exterminate All the Brutes,’ Raoul Peck Takes Aim at White Supremacy

      by

      After completing his 2016 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” the director Raoul Peck felt he’d had his say on the topic of U.S. race relations. Or at least his subject, the writer James Baldwin, had.In the film, Baldwin called whiteness a “metaphor for power” and called out this country’s legacy of racism in the bluntest of terms. What more could Peck say that Baldwin hadn’t?“Baldwin is one of the most precise scholars of American society,” Peck said in a video interview from his home in Paris. “If you didn’t understand the message, that means there is no hope for you.”The film went on to win over a dozen film awards and an Oscar nomination for best documentary feature. In addition to the accolades and rave reviews, “I Am Not Your Negro” prompted a revival of interest in Baldwin’s work that continues today. In the wake of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, the writer’s work seems as relevant as ever. Even so, said Peck: “I was astonished that people could continue to live their lives as if nothing had happened. As if these words didn’t exist.”The realization prompted Peck to try to uncover the roots of what Baldwin had written and spoken about so eloquently and passionately: the history of racism, violence and hate in the West. “What was the origin story of all of this?” Peck said he wondered. “Where did the whole ideology of white supremacy begin?”That search is the focus of Peck’s latest project, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” a supremely ambitious, deeply essayistic undertaking that combines archival footage, clips from Hollywood movies, scripted scenes and animated sequences. Premiering Wednesday on HBO Max, the four-part series charts the history of Western racism, colonialism and genocide, from the Spanish Inquisition and Columbus’s “discovery” of already populated lands, through the stories of the Atlantic slave trade, the massacre at Wounded Knee and the Holocaust.In scripted recreations, Caisa Ankarsparre plays a recurring role representing Indigenous at various times and places in history.David Koskas,/Velvet Film, via HBOFor Peck, who weaves his own story into the film using voice-over, snapshots and home movies, the project is an intensely personal one. In many ways, he is the ideal person to narrate a tale about western colonialism: After growing up in Haiti, a former colony that won its independence in 1804, he moved at age 8 with his family to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where his parents worked for the newly liberated government. He has also lived and worked in New York, West Berlin and Paris, and has directed films about the Haitian revolution (“Moloch Tropical”) and the assassinated Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba (“Lumumba: Death of a Prophet”).“I think my soul is somehow Haitian,” he said, “but I’ve been influenced by all the places I’ve been.”Peck began thinking about “Exterminate” in 2017 after Richard Plepler, then the chairman of HBO, “cursed” him “for 10 minutes” for not bringing “I Am Not Your Negro” to his network, then offered him carte blanche for his next project.“We’d been working on several film ideas, both documentary and feature film,” said Rémi Grellety, Peck’s producer for the past 13 years. “And Raoul said, ‘Let’s bring Richard the toughest idea.’”A photograph of Long Feather, left, and Father Craft by David Francis Barry from the 1880s, as seen in “Exterminate All the Brutes.”Denver Public Library, via HBOThe film, they told Plepler in a two-page pitch, would be based on the historian Sven Lindqvist’s 1992 book “Exterminate All the Brutes,” a mix of history and travelogue that used Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness” as a jumping off point to trace Europe’s racist past in Africa. (“Exterminate all the brutes” are the final words we hear from Kurtz, Conrad’s ivory trading “demigod.”) It would be about that, but also much more, much of which they hadn’t quite worked out yet.“There were a lot of ideas in that pitch,” Grellety remembered.After mining Lindqvist’s book, Peck determined he needed a similar text about the history of genocide in the United States. He came upon “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s American Book Award-winning examination of this country’s centuries-long war against its original inhabitants, and was “wowed.” Peck and Dunbar-Ortiz talked at length about her book and his film, and how the two might come together.Many of the film’s most powerful scenes derive from Dunbar-Ortiz’s text, including an animated sequence depicting Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of Choctaws crossing the Mississippi in 1831, on what came to be known as the Trail of Tears. When their dogs realize they are being left behind, they “set up a dismal howl,” leaping into the icy waters of the Mississippi in a vain attempt to follow.“I’m almost crying now, just thinking about it,” Dunbar-Ortiz said. “And in the film, showing it in animation, I think it’ll make a lot of people cry.”To round out the history, Peck turned to the work of his friend, the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who died in 2012. Peck was moved by a central idea in Trouillot’s book “Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History”: that “history is the fruit of power,” shaped and told (or not) by the winners.“That’s the history of Europe,” Peck said. “Europe got to tell the story for the last 600 years.”Peck with Eddie Arnold, who plays an Anglican cleric in one of several dramatizations that use anachronism and self-reflexiveness to challenge historical conventions. David Koskas/Velvet Film, via HBOThroughout the series, Peck takes down a succession of sacred cows, including the explorer Henry Morton Stanley (“a murderer”); Winston Churchill, who as a young war correspondent described the slaughter of thousands of Muslim troops at the 1898 Battle of Omdurman as “a splendid game”; and even “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” author, L. Frank Baum, who advocated the extermination of Native Americans after the massacre at Wounded Knee.Among his most frequent targets is Donald Trump, which the film compares — through a series of powerful juxtapositions — to bigots throughout history. “I am an immigrant from a shithole country,” Peck says at one point, one of several references in the series to Trump’s racist rhetoric.As a way of creating a “new vehicle to make you feel what the real world is,” Peck said, he filmed several scenes starring Josh Hartnett as a 19th-century U.S. Army officer (loosely based on Quartermaster General Thomas Sidney Jesup), a racist Everyman who reappears throughout history, hanging Black people and shooting Native Americans. Hartnett met Peck years ago on a failed film project, and then later at Cannes, and the two had become friends.“Last year, he called me and said he wanted a white American actor to play the tip of the genocidal sword of Western history, and he had thought of me,” Hartnett said. “I thought, wow, that’s flattering.”“I’ve known him for 20 years,” Peck said, “and so I knew I could have that conversation with him.”In March of last year, Hartnett and the rest of the cast and crew traveled to the Dominican Republic to film the live-action scenes, with locations around the island nation standing in for Florida and the Belgian Congo. Then the pandemic hit, shutting down operations the night before production was due to start. Peck considered his options and moved the entire shoot closer to home.“We were in the South of France in the summertime,” Hartnett said. “So it wasn’t a bad situation.”Through meta-textual moments and manipulations, Peck creates his own counterbalance to the dominant Western version of history, forcing viewers to think about the narratives, both popular and academic, they’ve been fed all their lives. In one scene, Hartnett’s character shoots an Indigenous woman (Caisa Ankarsparre), only to have it revealed that she is an actress on a film shoot. In another, a 19th century Anglican cleric gives a lecture dividing humanity into the “savage races” (Africans), the “semicivilized” (Chinese), and the “civilized” — to a contemporary audience filled with people of color.“I think my soul is somehow Haitian,” said Peck, who was born in Haiti but has lived all over the world, including his current home, Paris. “But I’ve been influenced by all the places I’ve been.”Matthew Avignone for The New York TimesEarly in the series, Peck declares, “There is no such thing as alternative facts.” But he also seems to recognize the selective nature of all historical narrative and the power of controlling the image, probing deeper truths in some scenes by asking viewers to imagine what history might be like if things had gone a different way. In one scene, white families are shackled, whipped and marched through the jungle. In another, Columbus’s landing party is slaughtered on the beaches of present-day Haiti in 1492.“I’m going to use every means necessary to convey these points,” Peck said.A longtime filmmaker and film lover, Peck filled his series with movie clips to illustrate Hollywood’s creative reshaping of history (John Wayne in 1960s “The Alamo”) and as a supplement to his arguments. (In a scene played for laughs, Harrison Ford shoots a scimitar-wielding Arab in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”)One of the most disturbing clips in the series — no small feat — is from an otherwise lighthearted Hollywood musical: “On the Town” (1949). In the scene, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Ann Miller and others cavort through a seemingly docent-free natural history museum, chanting in mock African gibberish, dressing as Indigenous Americans and letting out “war whoops,” and mugging as South Pacific “natives.” Set to the tune “Prehistoric Man,” the dance number conflates a club-toting cave man — “a happy ape with no English drape” — with Native Americans, Africans and Pacific Islanders.“When I watched it, I said, ‘No, my God, that’s not possible,’” Peck said. “It’s like they knew I was making this film. It just kept giving and giving.”Not surprisingly, getting rights to some of the clips was a struggle. “We didn’t lie,” Grellety said. “We were contacting people and saying, the title is ‘Exterminate All the Brutes.’ So they knew it wasn’t a romantic comedy.” In some cases, the filmmakers had to secure the clips by invoking fair use — as they did with “Prehistoric Man.”Peck might not have seen himself reflected in the movies he grew up watching as a young boy in Haiti, but he uses those Hollywood clips to help tell the history of the West anew. This process of imaginative recovery was no accident.“I was born in a world where I didn’t create everything before me,” he said. “But I can make sure that I take advantage of everything I can to show that the world as you think it is, is not the world as it is.“And those Hollywood films, those archive folders, those are windows that they didn’t know that they left open.” More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Cornelia Vertenstein Gave Many Lessons Beyond the Piano

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTimes InsiderA Musical Life With Echoes That Will LastThe lessons that the piano teacher Cornelia Vertenstein taught her students also resounded with many others, including me.Cornelia Vertenstein talking remotely with the reporter John Branch last year for a feature that made the front page. During the pandemic, she continued giving piano lessons to children, using FaceTime. Credit…John BranchFeb. 20, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETTimes Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Cornelia Vertenstein, a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, gave her last piano lesson at 6:30 a.m. on Feb. 1. She was not feeling well, so she arranged a ride to the hospital.Pneumonia settled in, and family gathered, sensing the end of a quietly extraordinary life.She began giving lessons at age 14 in war-torn Romania. She did not stop for nearly 80 years. Toward the end, adapting to the pandemic, Ms. Vertenstein gave lessons on FaceTime from her home in Denver.As her condition worsened this month, she reflected on her life’s work.“If I die, don’t be sad,” she told her daughter, Mariana. “I led a productive life helping children.”Near her hospital bed hung a copy of a New York Times story about Ms. Vertenstein, staying connected to her students through technology, that was published last May. It was on the front page, with a large photograph of her sitting at her piano, sharply dressed, hands folded, looking at the camera.Ms. Vertenstein died Feb. 12. Count me among the mourners, because I wrote that story.I never met Ms. Vertenstein in person; our interviews took place on FaceTime and over the phone. But she left a lasting impression on me and countless others whom she never met, judging by how widely and quickly her story spread. It spawned an invitation to the “Today” show (she declined) and inspired a German telephone commercial, among other things.Her family teased her for being a celebrity, but she was uncomfortable with the attention.“She’d say, ‘I just want to teach,’” her daughter said.As with most stories that I have written, I remember the experience of reporting more than the words that were published. My mind sees Ms. Vertenstein’s smile. I still have it in my phone, a screengrab from one of our conversations.I remember having technical difficulties the first time I interviewed her, all on my end. I was late to connect on FaceTime. Fumbling with my phone and laptop, I simply called her. She forgave my blundering tardiness.I remember telling her during our last conversation that I would like to visit her the next time I was in Denver, my hometown. I still have family in Colorado, so I try to get there a few times a year. This was last spring. Surely the pandemic would ease, we thought. But I have not been to Denver since.I also remember the unusual circumstances for how that story came to me. At the end of March, the pandemic smothering lives, I was searching for fresh story angles. Maybe the exponential powers of social media could be put to good use.“I’m entertaining thoughts, a community brainstorm,” I wrote on Facebook. “Know something that the world should know about that hasn’t already been read and seen?”The first response came from Jacqui Jorgeson, whom I met in 2015 when her boyfriend (now husband), Kevin Jorgeson, climbed the Dawn Wall of Yosemite’s El Capitan with his climbing partner, Tommy Caldwell.“Mind if I share?” she wrote. “I’ve got some awesomely weird friends.”Others shared, too. Ideas poured in. Most were the type that became familiar last spring, about quiet acts of heroism — sewing masks, volunteering for food banks, connecting with needy neighbors.In the end, I turned only one into a story.The suggestion stood out, about a Holocaust survivor in her 90s who lived alone and taught piano seven days a week. Unable to welcome her students into her home, as she had for decades, she took to conducting lessons using FaceTime. And now the spring recital was approaching.The note’s writer was Yvette Frampton, a Facebook acquaintance of Ms. Jorgeson. Her three children were among the dozens of Ms. Vertenstein’s students.Soon, I was like one of those students, virtually connected for scheduled meetings.Ms. Vertenstein coordinated our conversations around her teaching schedule and her iPad’s battery life — always a consideration, because there was no outlet near the piano. If she had an opening between 2 and 4, for example, she would ask if we could speak at 3, so that her device could charge on the counter for an hour first.Students considered Ms. Vertenstein a bit intimidating, at least at first, with her exacting standards and strong accent. (English was one of six languages she spoke.) She was the type of teacher that parents appreciate and that students may not, until they are older.With me, though, she was talkative and friendly. She spoke plainly of her life and its heartaches. She was patient with my probing questions. Her mind was sharp, her memory clear.All lives deserve more than a few paragraphs, but especially this one. I whittled it as sharply as I could to fit a newspaper word count.“The children do not know much of Ms. Vertenstein’s past — the yellow star she had to wear as a teenager during the war, the rocks thrown at her, the fist of fascism replaced by the slogging brutality of communism,” I wrote last year.It was mere context for her piano lessons.“It’s very painful to talk about,” Ms. Vertenstein told me. “Besides this, why should I tell those kids such sad stories?”There is no way to know how many children entered her house over the decades, learning scales or rehearsing Bach minuets and Haydn sonatas before exiting with a hug and a sticker and, perhaps, a life lesson not fully appreciated until later.She was sure not going to let social-distancing protocols get in the way of one-on-one piano lessons. Ms. Frampton and others helped teach Ms. Vertenstein to use FaceTime. The recitals, performed on Zoom from dozens of living rooms before a matrix of family members, were trickier. But they worked.Last May, Ms. Vertenstein hoped that she could soon welcome her students back into her home. That never happened.Her last student, it turns out, was Maggie Frampton, 14, one of those featured in the online recital last May. It was early in the morning two Mondays ago, on FaceTime before school. Maggie told her mother afterward that Ms. Vertenstein was not feeling well. (Ms. Vertenstein’s family said she did not have Covid-19 and had recently received the first dose of vaccine.)Now the Frampton children are among the 30 current students of Ms. Vertenstein in search of a new teacher.“Some naïve part of me thought she would live forever,” Yvette Frampton said.Also unclear is what will become of Ms. Vertenstein’s three pianos, including the Chickering & Sons that she and her husband bought for $600 in 1965, two years after landing in the United States, and the two grand pianos reserved mostly for older students or those rehearsing concerts or recitals.On Tuesday, on a cold and blustery Colorado afternoon, family and a few friends attended a graveside funeral as others watched online. The rabbi quoted Plato’s line about music giving “soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination” — the same line that Ms. Vertenstein chose for the program for last spring’s recital.Minutes before her small, plain coffin was lowered into the earth, notes from former students were read. One recalled how Ms. Vertenstein never liked the word “practice.”You do not practice, she would say. You make music.She sprinkled lessons everywhere.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Television

      Sesame Street Creates New Muppets for Rohingya Refugees

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘R’ is for Rohingya: Sesame Street Creates New Muppets for RefugeesNoor and Aziz are Rohingya Muppets who will feature in educational programming that will be shown in refugee camps.A child in a Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and Grover the Muppet in 2018.Credit…Ryan Donnell/Sesame WorkshopDec. 19, 2020, 2:03 a.m. ETBANGKOK — Six-year-old twins Noor and Aziz live in the largest refugee camp in the world. They are Rohingya Muslims who escaped ethnic cleansing in their native Myanmar for refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. They are also Muppets.On Thursday, the Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that runs the early education TV show “Sesame Street” and operates in more than 150 countries, unveiled Aziz and Noor as the latest Muppets in their cast of characters.The twins will appear with Elmo and other famous Muppets in educational programming about math, science, health and other topics that will be shown in the camps.They will speak Rohingya, the language of a group of people that the Myanmar authorities have refused to recognize as a legitimate ethnicity. Elements of Sesame Workshop’s curriculum will be dubbed into Rohingya.“They are among the most marginalized children on earth,” said Sherrie Weston, the president of social impact for the Sesame Workshop, who traveled to the Rohingya refugee camps several times to help formulate the Muppet twins’ characters and story lines. “For most Rohingya children, this will be the very first time that characters in media have looked like them, have sounded like them, and really reflect their rich culture.”More than half the residents of the Rohingya refugee settlements in Bangladesh are children. Many suffered trauma after security forces in Myanmar forced them out of their villages, murdering some of their fathers and raping their mothers.A survey by Doctors Without Borders, released in the wake of a brutal campaign in 2017 that compelled more than 750,000 Rohingya to flee the country in the span of a few months, found that at least 730 children below the age of five were killed from late August to late September of that year.The legacy of violence lingers in Bangladesh and has been incorporated into the Muppets’ histories. Noor, one of the Muppet twins, is scared of loud noises, just as many Rohingya children are today, as gunfire resounds in their memories.The Sesame Workshop has long sought to champion diversity and social justice. Muppets and their young playmates on Sesame Street have had autism, H.I.V. and Down syndrome. They have been homeless and struggled with the stigma of having an incarcerated parent. An Afghan Muppet exemplified the importance of educating girls.The muppets Noor and Aziz are Rohingya Muslim and new characters in the Sesame Street cast. Credit…Sesame WorkshopNoor and Aziz, as conceptualized by Sesame Workshop, are playful and get along well. Aziz, a boy, helps the family with household chores and is steeped in the Rohingya tradition of storytelling. Noor, a girl, is confident and loves learning. The programming chose to depict them specifically as twins so that they would able to play together as a girl and a boy in a way other siblings in this traditional Muslim community might not be able to as easily.“By modeling girls and boys being equal, by having characters that love to learn, it is important that we’re not only inspiring young girls, giving them a sense of possibility that they may not have had, but that we’re showing little boys that girls can have equal roles and responsibilities,” Ms. Weston said.The programming depicts the Rohingya Muppets as living in a vast warren of tent shelters where more than a million mostly stateless people have been crammed with little hope of returning to Myanmar. United Nations officials have suggested that their exodus bears the hallmarks of genocide.Life in the Rohingya refugee camps can be far harsher than what Noor and Aziz’s back stories suggest. Girls, who are often kept from school, tend to get married before they reach adulthood to ease the financial burden on their families. This year, hundreds of Rohingya girls spent months at sea in overloaded fishing vessels trying to get to Malaysia, where they had been promised as child brides to Rohingya men laboring as undocumented workers. Dozens died during the journey.On Friday, in Kutupalong, the biggest of the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, Ajmat Ara, 8, shook her head when asked whether she knew of a furry collection of characters called the Muppets. Unlike many girls, she is lucky and goes to a school run by an educational charity.“We’re learning English and Burmese in school,” she said, before running off to play.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More