Paris liberation made 'whites only'

Mike Thomson for  BBC Radio 4 :

Papers unearthed by the BBC reveal that British and American commanders ensured that the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944 was seen as a "whites only" victory.

Many who fought Nazi Germany during World War II did so to defeat the vicious racism that left millions of Jews dead.

Yet the BBC's Document programme has seen evidence that black colonial soldiers - who made up around two-thirds of Free French forces - were deliberately removed from the unit that led the Allied advance into the French capital.

By the time France fell in June 1940, 17,000 of its black, mainly West African colonial troops, known as the Tirailleurs Senegalais, lay dead.

Many of them were simply shot where they stood soon after surrendering to German troops who often regarded them as sub-human savages.

Their chance for revenge came in August 1944 as Allied troops prepared to retake Paris. But despite their overwhelming numbers, they were not to get it.

'More desirable'

The leader of the Free French forces, Charles de Gaulle, made it clear that he wanted his Frenchmen to lead the liberation of Paris.

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Charles Bukowski’s recent collection of essays and stories

From Tony R. Rodriguez's report as East Bay Literary Examiner :

Editor David Stephen Calonne brings to readers Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, a new assembly of previously uncollected stories and essays by the renowned latter-day Beat, Charles Bukowski. With selected pieces ranging from 1944-1990, Bukowski cleverly paints his careful moments of brutal honesty that can be regarded as some of the most sublime narratives Bukowski’s ever produced. Readers will again experience his artistically rugged tone of voice, one we find to be full of emotional risk and zeal for celebrating life. With brief moments of rambunctious revelry blending with snapshots of reflective salvation, Bukowski maintains his literary craft for savage style and deliberate deliverance.

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Indian elections: coalition likely, say stargazers

MUMBAI (AFP) — India's general election will produce no clear-cut winner, astrologers, tarot card readers and clairvoyants said, predicting another coalition government and even new polls in two years' time.

"There will be a coalition. Until June 23, the election picture will not be clear and final, whatever happens," astrologer and clairvoyant Bejan Daruwalla told AFP.

Daruwalla's prediction -- based, he said, on a vision -- is in line with more earthly methods of forecasting the result of this month's polls, which sees the Congress-led government up against the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and an array of smaller, regional parties.

Political pundits say BJP leader L.K. Advani could give Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a run for his money, and possibly unseat him after four years in power.

Stargazers Raj Kumar Sharma and Lalla Shah agreed with Daruwalla's assessment, viewing the current alignment of stars and planets as unfavourable for a majority in the lower house of parliament.

Sharma attributed it to having fiery Saturn in the house of its arch enemy Leo and positive Jupiter in negative Capricorn, creating "a very confusing state of mind for the public and for the politicians."

But the trio differed as to their predictions about which party would win most seats in the lower house of parliament -- and who would partner them to govern India's 1.1 billion people.

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Russian FSB bent on rewriting history of Estonia, Tallin newspaper maintains

Russian historian Alexander Dyukov, nicknamed the Dragon by his friends, arrived in Tallinn on the 60th anniversary of Stalinist deportations, Eesti Ekspress reports. Dyukov is one of the key players in Russia's information war against Estonia, according to the paper.

In Tallinn, he presented his book, The Myth About Genocide: Soviet Reprisals in Estonia (1940-1953). The Estonian translation of the book has been published by the former operative of the intelligence directorate of the KGB of Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic Vladimir Illyashevich who distributed the book free of charge to vistors of the presentation.

Since 2007, the young, 30 years old researcher has written and published five books, more than 50 articles and in addition has participated in many historical publications and drawing up of collections of documents. Eesti Ekspress names it a fact of surprising working capacity.

Dyukov is authorized to freely work in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Military Archive, the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Modern History, the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, the Central Archive of the FSB of the Russian Federation and the Central Archive the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, also in the Archive of Belarus KGB. He has free access to the archives which are unavailable to majority of Russian historians, not even speaking about Estonian ones.

His books have been always corresponding to current political discussion and their coverage in Russian mass media is simply massed, Eesti Ekspress marks. He has been contributing to such "hot" topics as reprisals of the Soviet authorities in the Baltic countries and in Western Ukraine. In his works Dyukov justifies deportations and other Communist crimes, the paper points out. Already the title of the book, The Myth About Genocide..., has been showing the accent he emphasizes in the publication.

Dyukov does not consider researches of Estonian historians even worth of serious analysis as they are always written on evidence and memoirs of the deported persons and to rumors and under influence of nationalist propaganda, as he puts it.

The Estonian paper assumes that judging in particular from the easy access to the FSB and KGB archives given to Dyukov, he in fact may appear an employee of the FSB and a provocateur in the information war. Eesti Espress even consider that a collective body of hardworking Russian historians-archivists may have been hidden under the name of this public figure.

It seems that there are bases for similar suspicions, the paper notes. Earlier this year, a photographer and a historian of Russian origin, Sergei Melnikoff, living in Florida, US, directly declared that Dyukov was a staff employee of the Russian FSB's 'P' department under the nickname of "FLAG". It means a banner in a literally translation, or a flag-officer, and in the information war, Dyukov is really a flag-officer, according to Eesti Ekspress. In his retort, Dyukov tried to deride Melnikoff's claims in his blog.

Application of methods of information and propaganda wars in the field of history research is nothing new even in Estonia, the paper adds. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet KGB and its Estonian branch published series of books and articles in which they branded every politically active Estonian living abroad and calling for freedom of their motherland as Nazi war criminal or at least as their sympathizer. or less active Estonians living abroad, Eesti Express concludes.

~ Eurasian Secret Services Daily Review ~

Alternative hedonism might just lead us to fulfilment

From Buzzle :

A new campaign by those disaffected with our shopping culture could be a cure for anxiety and low self-esteem, says Jackie Ashley.

Easter? It's about chocolate, obviously, but it is about so much else too. This is an appropriate time of year to reflect on our monotheism. We shall have one god, a jealous god, and no other gods shall we worship. Luckily, except for a few weirdos on the edges of society, we all do worship the one god, yea, the source of all happiness - shopping. It has just been predicted that we will spend £10.5bn over the four-day Easter break. Never have the British been so soaked in consumerism.

But perhaps there is evidence of a backlash against this glossy and omnipresent deity. Next week a conference at London Metropolitan University takes place with the title Countering Consumerism: Religious and Secular Responses. This may very well get them a fatwa from Tesco. Perhaps the chief executive of Marks & Spencer, which has seen sales improve so strongly in the past six months, will be standing outside with a placard declaring "Down with the blasphemers!", and a pile of organic air-freighted fruit with which to pelt the academics.

Interestingly, the conference does not start with the traditional leftwing case against consumerism, the austere hatred of waste that British people once felt, remembered by millions as simply: "Finish your dinner, what about the children in Africa?" There is nothing wrong with that, of course, except that the notion that we should all feel guilty about enjoying material plenty was so comprehensively defeated by the consumer booms of recent decades. It feels like a lost argument from another age.

Instead, the conference promises to focus on a backlash against the shopping culture for producing too much stress and pollution, and too little real satisfaction - the dark side of the consumer culture as experienced by those who are already sated. It talks of "alternative hedonism" - what Kate Soper, one of the organisers, calls "self-interested disaffection with consumerism" on the part of consumers themselves.

This is coming at a time when many organisations, from the television watchdog Ofcom to the National Consumer Council, have been looking at the effect of the shopping culture and its ubiquitous advertising, particularly on children. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of parents are worried. Across Europe there are moves to restrict junk-food advertisements from children's television.

With good reason; work by Juliet Schor of Boston College has tried to track how children are drawn into the shopping culture. Unsurprisingly, she finds that the more children are exposed to the media, mainly television, the more avidly they become consumers. More controversially, she goes on to argue that this produces "higher rates of depression, anxiety and psychosomatic complaints such as headache, stomach ache and boredom, as well as lower self-esteem". Consumerism, says Schor, is "ailing America's children."

The point of anti-consumerism, however, is not to ban one kind of advert any more than it is to produce better labelling about the fat and salt content of food. These things are useful in themselves, but if anything they could be called pro-consumerism: by reassuring consciences, they allow us to return to the shopping frenzy with renewed energy. The point of "alternative hedonism" is to confront the frenzy itself.

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