Rosa Luxemburg's body likely found 90 years after murder

The head of forensic medicine, Michael Tsokos, told the magazine that a decapitated body without hands and feet – in possession of the hospital for almost nine decades – is likely the remains of the iconic left-wing leader.

The body shows “astounding similarities with the real Rosa Luxemburg,” he said.

CT scans of the corpse revealed that the woman was between 40-50 years of age when she died, and suffered from osteoarthritis and leg length asymmetry.

Rosa Luxemburg was 47 when she was murdered, suffered from a congenital hip dislocation and had one leg longer than the other as a result.

Tsokos told the magazine he doubts that the true Luxemburg was ever buried, substantiating his claim by outlining the numerous inconsistencies he uncovered in her autopsy report conducted in June 1919.

Tsokos’ predecessors examined a corpse that was buried as Rosa Luxemburg on June 13, 1919 in Berlin’s Freidrichsfelde cemetery, but he said records show this corpse did not bear her significant anatomical characteristics.

According to Der Spiegel, the coroners at that time explicitly established that the corpse they investigated had neither a hip defect nor legs of differing lengths. They also failed to find definitive evidence of rifle butt blows to the cranium or a gunshot wound – though Luxemburg is said to have been beaten to the ground with a rifle and then killed by a shot to the head.

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From Why 'Red Rosa's' fans got the wrong grave

The body discovered in the Charité's vault was only discovered by chance as Dr Tsokos was working on putting together an exhibit. A computer scan has revealed the body of a woman aged between 40 and 50, who had suffered from arthritis and had one leg slightly longer than the other. Dr Tsokos said he was now hoping to obtain a personal item of Luxemburg in order to do a DNA test and definitively confirm the body was hers. "A hat would be nice," he said, as it could contain strands of her hair.

Luxemburg was assassinated along with fellow revolutionary Karl Liebknecht. She died at the height of a post World War One leftist uprising in Berlin at the hands of German soldiers still supporting the exiled and defeated Kaiser Wilhelm II. The historian Isaac Deutscher described her murder as "Nazi Germany's first triumph", the celebrated playwright Berthold Brecht wrote a poem in her honour and Communist East Germany named a central Berlin square after her.

Most of the German left – ranging from Social Democrats to hard-line former East German Communists – have a special place in their heart for "Red Rosa". The notion that millions of her fans have been duped for 90 years by going on pilgrimages each January to a grave that does not contain her body was greeted with shock and consternation yesterday.

The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation said that it was "deeply dismayed" to learn that the body of an unknown woman appeared to have been passed off as Luxemburg. It blamed Germany's then Minister for the Army, Gustav Noske, for playing a " disgusting game with the dead" and urged the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel to "clear up the mystery and finally lay Rosa Luxemburg's corpse to rest".

Revolutionary heroine

*Imperial Germany's sailors started the mutiny that would lead to the end of the First World War. The German Kaiser was forced into exile and Rosa Luxemburg seized the moment and founded the German Communist Party.

*By January 1919, the revolution was turning violent and Chancellor Friedrich Ebert called in the Freikorps militia to crush the uprising.

*Decades after Luxemburg's death, the dissidents who helped to bring down the Berlin Wall were fond of quoting her maxim: Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter.

The security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal

Lawrence J. Korb reports in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

During the last week of April, I visited four cities in Pakistan (Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, and Karachi). The purpose of the trip was to discuss a December 2008 Center for American Progress report that I coauthored, Partnership for Progress: Advancing a New Strategy for Prosperity and Stability in Pakistan and the Region.

Although this was my first trip to Pakistan, one of the two other colleagues who accompanied me had visited the country on three previous occasions. For two reasons, we had exceptional access to some 60 current and former civilian and military government officials (including a two-hour visit to the ISI headquarters), members of the media and academia, and heads of nongovernmental organizations. First, one of the members of the working group who helped us formulate the report is now the Pakistani ambassador to the United States. Second, several of our colleagues from the Center for American Progress have moved into key positions in the Obama administration. Moreover, since we aren't in government, it was easier for us to challenge the bromides that some officials peddle.

Before the visit, I knew Pakistan was facing several critical political, economic, and security problems. Still, there were some hopeful signs: Pakistan held free and fair elections in February 2008; the country has an independent judiciary and a vibrant civil society and media; and the Obama administration and Congress were finally making U.S. relations with Pakistan a priority.

That said, the day we arrived, the U.S. media gave the impression that Pakistan was in dire straits. Some were going so far as to compare the current condition of Pakistan to that of contemporary Somalia, a failed state already in or about to be engulfed in chaos. Similarly, some high-level officials in the Obama administration contend Pakistan resembles Iran in 1979, a Muslim country about to be taken over by a group of radical Islamists. Others see Islamabad as Saigon in 1975, a capital city about to fall to an advancing enemy. Finally, some analysts compare today's Pakistan to that of Afghanistan in the 1990s, when the Taliban stepped into a chaotic situation and restored order.

After my trip, though, I believe that all of these comparisons are inaccurate and overstated. Pakistan isn't about to descend into chaos, nor will it be taken over by the Taliban any time soon.

The trip reinforced my belief that Pakistan has a great many political, economic, and social problems that prevent it from achieving its full potential. But the majority of the population wants the duly constituted government to fulfill its responsibilities to promote the general welfare and provide for the common defense. They aren't looking to some outside force such as the Taliban to assume control of the country and solve these problems. Unlike Afghanistan in the 1990s, the Taliban in Pakistan isn't seen as a group capable of imposing order on a chaotic situation. Rather, the Taliban is seen as an organization trying to upset the existing order. For instance, the majority of the Pakistani population urged the government to take forceful action against the Taliban when it reneged on its agreement in the Swat District.

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Sergei Parajanov - 'The Color of Pomegranates'

Video from: The Color of Pomegranites.
"THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES (1969) Sergei Paradjanov's baroque masterpiece was banned in the Soviet Union for its religious sentiment and nonconformity to "Socialist realism"; its director, a tirelessly outspoken campaigner for human rights, was convicted on a number of trumped-up charges and sentenced to five years of hard labor in the gulag. A wave of protest from the international film community led to his release in 1978. Aesthetically the most extreme film ever made in the U.S.S.R., Pomegranates, his hallucinatory epic account of the life of the 18th Century Armenian national poet, Sayat Nova, conveys the glory of what a cinema of high art can be like."




"Interview with director Sergei Parajanov (fragment).

Sergei Parajanov (Sarkis Parajanian) 1924 Tbilisi -1990 Erevan.

One of the 20th century's greatest masters of cinema Sergei Parajanov was born in Georgia to Armenian parents and it was always unlikely that his work would conform to the strict socialist realism that Soviet authorities preferred. After studying film and music, Parajanov became an assistant director at the Dovzhenko studios in Kiev, making his directorial debut in 1954, following that with numerous shorts and features, all of which he subsequently dismissed as "garbage". However, in 1964 he was able to make Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964), a rhapsodic celebration of Ukrainian folk culture, and the world discovered a startling and idiosyncratic new talent. He followed this up with the even more innovative Sayat Nova (1968) (which explored the art and poetry of his native Armenia in a series of stunningly beautiful tableaux), but by this stage the authorities had had enough, and Paradjanov spent most of the 1970s in prison on almost certainly rigged charges of "homosexuality and illegal trafficking in religious icons". However, with the coming of perestroika, he was able to make two further films before succumbing to cancer in 1990.
source: imd"




Steeped in religious iconography, The Color of Pomegranates is a deeply spiritual testament to director Sergei Parajanov’s fascination with Armenian folk art and culture. It is also a controversial work, which, coupled with another of his films, Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors, led to his arrest and imprisonment in a Soviet Gulag for four years. The Soviets insisted he was guilty of selling gold and icons illegally and committing “homosexual acts.” In reality, his only crime was offending the tenets of socialist realism, both in his daring surrealistic form and in his choice of subject matter. While many of the popular films of this era in Soviet cinema were largely propaganda designed to serve the ideological interests of the regime, Parajanov chose to focus on the ethnography and spirituality of the Ukraine, Armenia, and Georgia.

Food Fight

By touristpictures:

"An abridged history of American-centric warfare, from WWII to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict.

For a breakdown of the actual battles portrayed in the film, visit:
http://www.touristpictures.com/foodfight/index.htm

For the official cheat sheet (breakdown of the foodstuffs), visit:
http://www.touristpictures.com/foodfight/cheat.htm

Now, to answer some FAQs...
- The food in this film was consumed either by myself or my dog after shooting. None of the cast went to waste.
- The software used was photoshop and after effects.
- The film took me 3 months to do.
- Although it seems like stop motion, most of it was stop motion created within After effects, using keyframe animation. I am basically moving the food around within the program, frame by frame, which is the same as traditional stop motion, only it's digital."

'Art, like language, is a system of symbolic exchange that introduces exchange itself'

From The Case Against Art by John Zerzan

During the first million or so years as reflective beings humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that "unfallen social reality" because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliche about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid.

The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure or blown pigment - a dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though concurrent sculpture, such as the widely-found "venus" statuettes of women, was quite stylized. Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede domestication of nature. Significantly, the "sympathetic magic" or hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in the light of evidence that nature was bountiful rather than threatening.

The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt before: in Worringer's words, "creation in order to subdue the torment of perception." Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away. The rapid development of the earliest ritual or ceremony parallels the birth of art, and we are reminded of the earliest ritual re- enactments of the moment of "the beginning," the primordial paradise of the timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in controlling loss, the belief in coercion itself.

And we see the earliest evidence of symbolic division, as with the half-human, half-beast stone faces at El Juyo. The world is divided into opposing forces, by which binary distinction the contrast of culture and nature begins and a productionist, hierarchical society is perhaps already prefigured.

The perceptual order itself, as a unity, starts to break down in reflection of an increasingly complex social order. A hierarchy of senses, with the visual steadily more separate from the others and seeking its completion in artificial images such as cave paintings, moves to replace the full simultaneity of sensual gratification. Le'vi-Strauss discovered, to his amazement, a tribal people that had been able to see Venus in daytime; but not only were our faculties once so very acute, they were also not ordered and separate. Part of training sight to appreciate the objects of culture was the accompanying repression of immediacy in an intellectual sense: reality was removed in favor of merely aesthetic experience. Art anesthetizes the sense organs and removes the natural world from their purview. This reproduces culture, which can never compensate for the disability.

Not surprisingly, the first signs of a departure from those egalitarian principles that characterized hunter-gatherer life show up now. The shamanistic origin of visual art and music has been often remarked, the point here being that the artist-shaman was the first specialist. It seems likely that the ideas of surplus and commodity appeared with the shaman, whose orchestration of symbolic activity portended further alienation and stratification.

Art, like language, is a system of symbolic exchange that introduces exchange itself. It is also a necessary device for holding together a community based on the first symptoms of unequal life. Tolstoy's statement that "art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feeling," elucidates art's contribution to social cohesion at the dawn of culture. Socializing ritual required art; art works originated in the service of ritual; the ritual production of art and the artistic production of ritual are the same. "Music," wrote Seu-ma-tsen, "is what unifies."

As the need for solidarity accelerated, so did the need for ceremony; art also played a role in its mnemonic function. Art, with myth closely following, served as the semblance of real memory. In the recesses of the caves, earliest indoctrination proceeded via the paintings and other symbols, intended to inscribe rules in depersonalized, collective memory. Nietzsche saw the training of memory, especially the memory of obligations, as the beginning of civilized morality. Once the symbolic process of art developed it dominated memory as well as perception, putting its stamp on all mental functions. Cultural memory meant that one person's action could be compared with that of another, including portrayed ancestors, and future behavior anticipated and controlled. Memories became externalized, akin to property but not even the property of the subject.

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