Silent Sunday ...in Spring

Rome won't forget

67 years ago one of the most horrendous atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in Italy took place in Rome. The ‘Fosse Ardeatine massacre’ was a mass execution carried out 24 March 1944 by Nazi German occupation troops during the Second World War as a reprisal for a partisan attack conducted on the previous day in central Rome.

On 24 March 1944, after a partisan attack in via Rasella where 33 soldiers of the Bozen battalion died, the Nazi occupation troops in Rome, under the command of gen. Maetzler, ordered colonel Kappler to retaliate by executing 10 Italians for every German soldier killed. A total of 335 Italian hostages were taken, composed of civilians (including Jews from the local community) who were casually picked up on the city streets, Italian prisoners of war (up to General rank), previously captured partisans and some inmates from Roman prisons. The massacre was perpetrated without prior public notice in what was then a little-frequented rural suburb of the city, inside the tunnels of the disused quarries near the Via Ardeatina.

The bodies of the victims were placed in piles. German military engineers set explosives to seal the caves and hide the atrocity. They remained summarily buried and abandoned for over a year inside the caves. They were eventually found, exhumed and given proper burial only after our capital city was liberated by the Allies in 1945. Subsequently, the Cave Ardeatine became a National Monument and a Memorial Cemetery open daily to visitors to remember and honour the victims. Never forget the atrocities of the past to prevent them in the future.

Silent Sunday ...and the Supermoon

(photo taken with my old Nokia N95)

Happy Birthday, Italy!

Today is my country’s birthday. My controversial but lovely Italy is 150 years old. Pretty young for a country, isn’t it? As a matter of fact, modern Italy is one of the youngest nations in the world, having become unified in 1861 and a republic only after 1946, after World War II.

I hope you won’t mind a brief history lesson.

The process of the unification of Italy is known as the Italian Risorgimento. Back in 19th century there were 4 states in Italy, namely the Austrians’ rule in Venice, the Papal States, the new expanded Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Naples and Sicily). After Napoleon lost his Empire and his Italian kingdom, Europe was entirely reshaped by the Vienna Congress and Italy started to gain a sense of unity and began to feel the need to become a unified nation. The driving force for this was the economical and philosophical needs of politicians, but slowly even the masses began to see the peninsula as one under the rule of the Savoias.

In April 1860, separate insurrections began in Messina and Palermo in Sicily, both of which had been opposing the Spanish rule. On 6th May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi - an Italian patriot and soldier - and his ‘army’ of about a thousand Italian “red shirts” volunteers (called I Mille), left from Quarto near Genoa and landed near Marsala, Sicily, with the aim of “freeing” southern Italy and Sicily from the centuries old rule of the Bourbon Kings from Spain. Garibaldi’s Mille attracted scattered bands of rebels, and the combined forces defeated the enemy at Calatafimi on 13th May. Within three days, the invading force had swelled to 4,000 men. The next day, Garibaldi proclaimed himself governor of Sicily in the name of Vittorio Emanuele II of Italy (previously King of Savoy).

In less than a month, and against all odds, they had seized Palermo. The defeat of the 20,000-strong Bourbon army in Palermo sent a shiver up the spine of Italy and through the Bourbon monarchy in Naples, setting the stage for the unification of Italy and ultimately leading to the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy (17th March 1861) in Turin (Piedmont) which became the first capital of Italy.

The 150 year celebrations started last year in May and will conclude this year. Many events are on the calendar in Italy to mark this momentous occasion. There will also be celebrations around the world, as there are about 60 million Italians, or descendants of Italians, living outside of Italy.

My green-white-and red flag is out in the wind and rain to my neighbours’ great “joy”.

Buon Compleanno, Italia!

Powerless against the nuclear power

Japan has ordered emergency workers to withdraw from its stricken nuclear plant amid a surge in radiation, temporarily suspending efforts to cool the overheating reactors. The workers, who have been dousing the reactors at the Fukushima plant with seawater in a frantic effort to stabilize their temperatures, had no choice but to pull back from the most dangerous areas.

The medias are in a frenzy about this now, somehow overshadowing the tragic situation of millions of people struggling along the coast with little food, water or heat, and already chilly temperatures dropped further as a cold front moved in.
A lot of help is needed and urgently.

But if a flood can be cleaned up, a fire put out, earthquake damage repaired, the effects of a nuclear meltdown will last, well not forever, but certainly hundreds years. The speed this crisis has escalated just goes to show how dangerous nuclear power stations are, When the sea went back they looked intact and just needed diesel generation equipment or auxiliary pumps to run the cooling systems as the reactors were shut down following the earthquake. Less than one week on and they have exploded and are leaking radiation. Everyone was saying this is not as bad as Chernobyl but four reactors are in a critical situation.

I remember the tragedy of Chernobyl vividly. I also remember the conscript soldiers given shovels and brooms and ordered to climb the destroyed reactor and sweep the debris back in the bowels of the wreck. They died in their thousands, but never 'reported' by the Soviet authorities of course. I'm also aware that vast swathes of the Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Poland remain fenced off and unsuitable for food production and will remain so for many, many years.

The Fukushima reactor may not be a similar disaster (hopefully not!), but it shows that technology is a fragile thing, and we simply can't afford to make fundamental mistakes any more.

Please do't forget to donate, every penny counts:

http://www.redcross.org.uk/Donate-Now/Make-a-single-donation/Japan-Tsunami-Appeal

Silent Sunday ...in sunny York

Is This an Act of God?

No doubt you have seen the reports of the massive earthquake/tsunami in Japan. When these terrible things happen, I always think of my friend Susan. She is deeply religious and totally determined to save as many human souls as possible from eternal damnation.
As things get worse and worse in the world, she thinks that we can see Jesus' prophecies coming true and it will not be long now before God steps in and brings an end to our old sinful World. But is this really an act of God?

In the English language “an act of God” is a legal term, which is used to define natural disasters, which happen with no human intervention and are completely outside of their control. Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides – and tsunamis like the one today in Japan - all of these are examples of natural disasters, causing environmental, financial and unfortunately human losses… If it is an act of God, what does it mean – the divine scourge for our sins, a reminder about the supreme power, or it is just one of the imminent components of the universe order, which keeps the scales between Good and Evil in balance?

WHY?

Maybe an act of God is just an extreme chance for people to respond in their turn with an act of Man and prove that mutual help and support, sympathy and kindness, self-sacrifice and love still remain at the core of the human soul. The deeply wounded Japanese people will brace themselves for more suffering when the actual toll of the disaster surfaces, but I am certain that they will work hard and come back stronger than before with a little bit of help from us all.

Red Cross Disaster Fund:
http://www.redcross.org.uk/disasterfund/?approachcode=68861_DFjapmar