Written on 16 December 2018.

    In den Jahrzehnten nach dem II. Weltkrieg war Italien bitter arm. Wie schon unter dem Faschismus zuvor mussten sich die Kreativität, Frömmigkeit und Kunstliebe des Volkes mit einfachsten Materialien begnügen und Raffinement durch Fleiss zu ersetzen versuchen. Berühmt sind die Laubsägearbeiten aus dieser Zeit und die Weihnachtskrippen.

    Rom besitzt nicht wie Neapel eine Strasse (S. Gregorio Armeno), die ganzjährig Krippen herstellt und verkauft. Roms Krippenkunst ist bescheiden, häuslicher Art.

    Die hier vorgestellte Krippe zeigt süditalienische Weihnachtsfolklore auf kleinstem Raum, nämlich unter einem Glassturz: Arte Povera eben. Ausgangspunkt: ein Glassturz, wie man ihn für Madonnen und Heilige verwendet, die Mindestform der Scarabattola, des Gehäuses einer Presepe, einer Krippe.  Es ist schon erstaunlich, wie vielfältig das Leben unter einem Glassturz sein kann!

    Die römische Weihnacht verrät ihren Ursprung im Leben der Abruzzen-Hirten, die in den Vor-Weihnachtstagen in die Stadt kommen und in den Strassen auf ihren Dudelsäcken spielen.

Frohe Weihnachten und ein gutes Neues Jahr!

Höhe: 42 cm

Alter: 1950-60

Fundort: Mercatino via Nomentana, Rom

Stil: Arte Povera

Beleuchtung: original

Written on 07 December 2018.

Flashback:

After February 21, 2003, seven groups of foreign tourists of different nationalities, totalling 31 people, disappeared in southeastern Algeria. Most of them were Germans or German speaking individuals, and many were experienced in desert travel and well equipped.

On August 20 2003, the captives returned home after having been freed by their abductors, a militant Islamic group operating in southern Algeria. The following article, first published by Deutsche Rundschau in 2003,  offered an alternative hypothesis for the mysterious abduction which may appear far fetched and surreal. But in the central Sahara mirages are rather commonplace.

   It all began in 1919 in Upper Silesia's rust belt where a special military unit, the Industrieschutz Oberschlesien, had been formed by the Germans in order to defend Europe's largest coal and steel industry against Poles and the French occupation force. A plebiscite took place in 1921, organized on the German side by Hans Lukaschek and Carl Ulitzka on behalf of Deutscher Schutzbund, a Berlin-based non-governmental organization. Thanks to the Industrieschutz' efforts to prevent Polish voters from infiltrating Upper Silesia, and to clever busing of German voters returning from the Rhineland, Germany won the plebiscite with 60 percent of the vote, and the special unit was subsequently transferred to other "sensitive" locations.

   In 1938, the special unit, now called Deutsche Kompanie and kept under the command of the Abwehr secret service, was relocated to Brandenburg near Berlin, and the unit was henceforth called the "Brandenburgers," one of the least known German elite troops in World War II.

   Their assignment was covert, clandestine action. For their commando activities in eastern Europe and the Balkans, ethnic Germans — Volksdeutsche — from the respective countries were enlisted who after extensive training at Brandenburg entered their area of operations in local garb, speaking local dialects, and being for all practical purposes unrecognizable among their host population.

   These teams performed very successfully. Therefore a special unit called Brandenburger Tropeneinheit was established for Hitler's African projects and arrived in North Africa in June 1941. These men, some of them former members of the French Foreign Legion, spoke English, French and Arabic. Their first job was to perform reconnaissance for Rommel's Afrika-Korps. Later, commandoes were sent to Cairo and to Assiut in central Egypt where their leaders met with Anwar El-Sadat — the later President of Egypt — who promised to help instigate an Arab rebellion against the British which, however, never happened.

   In July of 1942, Leutnant von Leipzig started the ambitious Unternehmen Dora as a reconnaissance operation in what is today Niger and Chad to determine how the important Allied supply route between the Gulf of Guinea and Port Sudan on the Red Sea could be interrupted. One of Leipzig's teams arrived in the Tassili n'Ajjer mountain region of southeastern Algeria, established a camp there, terrified the (free) French troops, and withdrew to Libya after a skirmish with the dumbfounded French who did not know how to deal with strange soldiers in French uniforms who spoke fluent French.

   Von Leipzig's second group, about 30 men under the command of Corporal (Feldwebel) Stegmann moved south to the Tibesti mountains in what is now northern Chad, with the objective to proceed to Lake Chad and disturb the French. With the help of the Tibbu bedouin who hated the French, Stegmann succeeded in occupying the ancient caravan town of Bardai in the northern foothills of the Tibesti.

   Shortly after overpowering the small French garrison, news came that a large French contingent was on the way to Barzai, and Stegmann decided to return to Libya where all Brandenburger teams were summoned by Rommel.

   After the battle of Al-Alamein, all Brandenburgers in Africa were captured by the British. This is the end of official history.

   But there were still a few Brandenburgers who had been lost sight of.

   Stabsgefreiter Besemer noted in his diary:

   "When Feldwebel Stegmann decided to return to Marzuq (in Libya, ed.) we were dumbfounded. There we were, in the heart of Africa, surrounded by friendly tribespeople who urged us to stay on and help them fight the French. Since the days of Leo Frobenius no German had set foot here; we were looked upon as half gods (Halbgoetter, ed.).

   We were perfectly well organized. We had a few British Bedford lorries, Norton motorcycles and other captured vehicles, our own arms and the guns taken from the French at Barzai. Petrol arrived in barrels on camel back from Faya Lardeau; food was abundant, and we still had quite a stock of pastis and red wine supplied by the French, plus their horrible cigarettes.

   When Stegmann decided to withdraw rather than face the French, several of us protested. Why not hide in the mountains, burying our German uniforms and dressing in local costumes? Our outpost would be invaluable once Rommel had defeated Colonel Stirling and General Alexander and could send the three divisions necessary to occupy the western Sudan, as Stegmann had calculated.

   From our base in the Tibesti we would be able to undertake reconnaissance missions to Khartoum, to Ndjamena and Moundou — thus exploring the central part of the Allied trade and supply route.

   Stegmann was not swayed by our arguments. But he decided that those who volunteered to stay should stay on and follow their own strategy until the Afrika-Korps would expand southbound and catch up with us. That is why eleven of us decided to remain here and establish our camp in the Tibesti."

   The course of events, however, did not match Besemer's expectations. Stegmann returned to the Cyrenaica, Rommel was defeated, and the German presence in North Africa came to a sudden end. Besemer and his men found themselves lost and isolated in the Tibesti mountains of the central Sahara desert with nowhere to go. Give themselves up to the French or to the British in Sudan? Facing detainment possibly as unprotected irregulars and perhaps later — under the best of circumstances — returning to a devastated Germany which for some of them was not even their home country, anyway?

   They decided to stay on in their rather comfortable cave dwellings in the Tibesti, passing for Arabs from one of those coastal Libyan tribes whose men are red-haired, blue-eyed and freckled. They loved hunting, taking local women, trading with the Peul and Tibbu in arms, animals, technical gear and — occasionally — slave children on their way from the South to the markets in Dongola and Omdurman. Their trusty old Wehrmacht radios worked fine, and replacement P800 and P2000 valves were easy to find.

   The years passed. In the 1950s, a German illustrated magazine (was it Quick or Deutsche Illustrierte?) published a reportage on members of the German Tibesti colony seen shopping in Khartoum. Since then, their traces have been covered by quicksand. But that does not mean they have vanished.

   As years became decades, things changed considerably for the tiny German colony. A new generation of Arabic, French and Tedaga (a local language) speaking children grew up, taking business and defence over from their fathers who, however, were successful in maintaining German discipline, culture and — to some extent — language in the colony. In practice, the boys learned to speak and read German whereas the girls were allowed "to go native."

   In 1964, the Tibesti had ceased to be part of the French military administration of Equatorial Africa. It came nominally under Chadian sovereignty. From the 1980s onward, the idyllic life in the Tibesti was disrupted by warfare. Libya's Ghaddafi occupied the Aouzou strip north of the Tibesti which had always been claimed by Libya. However, the French — in support of the Chad government — drove the Libyans out. As the main result of warfare, both sides had buried thousands of land mines along the roads and caravan paths through and around the Tibesti.

   This fact brought two different results for the German colony: as travel had become extremely hazardous, the scarce Tibesti population was largely left alone and protected from tourism and government military; however, trade was badly affected by the mine scare. In the late 1990s, the Tibesti region rebelled against the N'Djamena government but the rebel leader, Youssouf Togoimi, was badly wounded by a land mine and died in a Libyan hospital.

   As a consequence of hardship and insecurity during past decades, many of the pastoral people in the Tibesti region had migrated south and to the more developed area around Lake Chad. The small German colony was hence threatened by shortage of labour and supplies.

   The membership of the colony itself which had once been growing due to large numbers of children, started to shrink as many of the young people left their relatively comfortable but desperately isolated Shangri La in search of modern life and fellow humans.

   At this point, we surmise, the project arose of recruiting new German members for the colony. Since, for obvious reasons, it was not possible to advertise job openings in German media, the elders decided to engage young Germans and other German speakers already available nearby: tourists.

   They are crossing the Sahara in scores every year along paved roads and the established caravan routes of southeastern Algeria where they could easily be abducted and taken along the Niger-Libya border line to the Tibesti. After all, the distance between Tamanrasset or the Tassili and the Tibesti is not longer than between the Tibesti and Khartoum, for instance.

   Hardly anybody searching for lost tourists in Algeria would suspect that they might have been moved across two borders into Chad. And yet, for a determined and knowledgeable crew of kidnappers with a history of covert operations that would not seem an impossible task.

Ihsan al-Tawil

Hi there !

If you are still holding on to your German desert kingdom in the Tibesti please drop us a line to

           germanpages(at)yahoo.com

We'll keep your message strictly confidential !

Cheers,

Ihsan

Written on 13 December 2018.

   What the internet looks like to users in the U.S. can be quite different from the online experience of people in other countries. Some of those variations are due to government censorship of online services, which is a significant threat to internet freedom worldwide. But private companies – many based in the U.S. – are also building obstacles to users from around the world who want to freely explore the internet.

   Website operators and internet traffic managers often choose to deny access to users based on their location. Users from certain countries can’t visit certain websites – not because their governments say so, or because their employers want them to focus on work, but because a corporation halfway around the world has made a decision to deny them access.

   This geoblocking, as it’s called, is not always nefarious. U.S. companies may block traffic from certain countries to comply with federal economic sanctions. Shopping websites might choose not to have visitors from countries they don’t ship goods to. Media sites might not be able to comply with other nations’ privacy laws. But other times it’s out of convenience, or laziness: It may be easier to stop hacking attempts from a country by blocking every user from that country, rather than increasing security of vulnerable systems.

   Whatever its justifications, this blocking is increasing on all kinds of websites and is affecting users from almost every country in the world. Geoblocking cuts people off from global markets and international communications just as effectively as government censorship. And it creates a more splintered internet, where each country has its own bubble of content and services, rather than sharing a global commons of information and interconnection.

Measuring geoblocking globally

 When a website blocks access, it sometimes delivers a notice saying so. 

   As a team of internet freedom researchers, my colleagues and I investigated the mechanics of geoblocking, including where geoblocking is happening, what content was being blocked and how websites were practicing geoblocking.

   We used a service called Luminati, which provides researchers remote, automated access to residential internet connections around the world. Our automated system used those connections to see what more than 14,000 sites look like from 177 countries, and compared the results in each country.

   Websites that didn’t block traffic typically served us a large file providing rich internet content, including text, images and video. Websites that were blocked usually delivered just a short notice saying that access was denied because of the visitor’s location. When the same website delivered a large file to an address in one country and a very short one to another, we knew we had a good chance of finding that the site was conducted geoblocking.

   We found that the internet does indeed look very different depending on where you’re connecting from. Users in countries under U.S. sanctions – Iran, Syria, Sudan and Cuba – had access to significantly fewer websites than in other countries. People in China and Russia faced similar restrictions, though not as many. Some countries are less affected, but of the 177 countries we studied, every one – except the Seychelles – was subjected to at least some geoblocking, including the U.S.

   Shopping websites were the most likely to geoblock, perhaps because of economic sanctions or more straightforward business reasons. But some websites hosting news and educational resources chose to block users from specific countries, limiting those people’s access to outside information and perspectives.

The role of internet middlemen

   We also found that many websites are taking advantage of geoblocking services provided by their hosting companies and online middleman firms called content delivery networks. These companies operate systems that preload web content at key locations around the world to speed service to nearby internet users, so an Australian looking for an article in the Washington Post doesn’t have to wait for the request to travel halfway around the world and back. With a content delivery network, there’s already an up-to-date electronic copy of the Washington Post stored in, say, Sydney.

When a website blocks access, it sometimes delivers a notice saying so

   Many content delivery network services include a dashboard where a site administrator can easily select which countries to deliver the website’s information to – and which ones to block. Content delivery networks in general are a lot cheaper than they used to be, which means more and more website operators are getting their hands on simple geoblocking tools.

   In fact, based on data that were provided to us by Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest content delivery networks, this trend is only increasing. As of August 2018, more than 37 percent of Cloudflare’s large-business customers block their website in at least one country.

   Sometimes an unavailable website is merely an inconvenience – I can’t order my Irish friends a pizza from the U.S., for example. Other times geoblocking can really cause problems. We encountered an Iranian student who couldn’t apply to graduate school abroad because the admissions website wouldn’t accept payment of the application fee from Iran. Another person may be unable to read the news from a major international city, or plan a trip abroad because travel websites are all unavailable from their home.

Geoblocking is ineffective

   Restricting access based on geography is unlikely to affect all internet users equally. As when evading censorship, getting around a geoblock isn’t necessarily difficult. But it might be expensive, expose users to additional tracking of their online activity, or require a level of technical literacy that not everyone has. Even if a user can ultimately access the content they were originally denied, they may bear a significant burden to gain access to the wider internet.

   It’s also not easy – or necessarily accurate – to identify an internet user’s physical location. Using a computer’s numeric IP address to estimate where in the world it’s being used is notoriously unreliable. At least some users are likely being unfairly denied access to online services because their network address is determined to be somewhere they are not. However, rather than expanding the accessibility and accuracy of geoblocking, our group is encouraging researchers to address the needs of websites while maintaining as open an access policy as possible.

   The internet has indelibly changed the world and the way people connect and do business. Researchers are working hard to keep this valuable resource available to everyone. Companies shouldn’t thwart those efforts by discriminating against users only because of where they are when they connect.

Allison McDonald -- The Conversation

UPDATE

see here:

Internet Censorship 2022: A Global Map of Internet Restrictions

Written on 01 December 2018.

   Emmanuel Macron ist ein unglaublicher Glücksfall für Europa. Dass die Franzosen einen Präsidenten gewählt haben, der als Nachfolger von Robert Schuman und Jacques Delors das Projekt Europa nicht nur retten, sondern einen grossen Schritt voran bringen will, bietet den Europäern ein historisches Zeitfenster, das sie nützen oder versäumen können. Begreift der Kontinent denn nicht, wie einmalig und möglicherweise kurz die Chance ist, dass ein Pro-Europäer Frankreich in einer Zeit regiert, in der Populisten und Souvrainisten unterschiedlicher Couleur sich bemühen, das Projekt Europa zu torpedieren?

   Schon scheinen die Franzosen zu bereuen, dass sie Macron gewählt haben. Gerade deshalb ist es dringend notwendig, ihm europapolitische Erfolge zu verschaffen, die die Grande Nation mit dem hohen Benzinpreis und anderen Wehwehchen versöhnen. Angesichts der schwierigen Lage in Paris und der möglichen Kürze des Zeitfensters sollte man annehmen, dass in den einschlägigen Ministerien in Berlin mit Hochdruck gearbeitet wird, um Macrons Visionen für Europa mit deutscher Hilfe bestmöglich und schnell zu verwirklichen.

   Doch leider ist das Gegenteil der Fall. Kanzlerin Merkel und Vizekanzler Scholz ergehen sich in warmen Worten, sind ach! so europäisch gesinnt, aber in der Realität stehen sie auf dem Schlauch.

   Ohne deutsche Unterstützung wird Frankreichs Bemühen, eine europäische Digitalsteuer einzuführen, ad calendas graecas vertagt. Berlin hat Angst, Körperschaftsteuer-Aufkommen zu verlieren und fürchtet sich in vorauseilendem Gehorsam vor amerikanischen Vergeltungsmassnahmen, da ja in erster Linie US-Konzerne von der Steuer betroffen wären.

   Auch Macrons wichtige Vorschläge in Richtung auf das alte Projekt einer europäischen Wirtschaftsregierung --nämlich die Eurozone mit einem eigenen Budget auszustatten und einen europäischen Finanzminister zu etablieren -- werden in Berlin nicht unterstützt. Selbst die deutsche Lieblingsidee, den europäischen Stabilitätsmechanismus ESM zu einem Europäischen Währungsfonds auszubauen, wird zwar von deutscher Seite konkretisiert, doch die von Berlin angedachten Kreditbedingungen sind so hart, dass sich derzeit kaum ein Land dafür qualifiziert, und schon gar kein notleidendes.

   Macrons Vorschläge würden auch bei voller Unterstützung Deutschlands auf viel Ablehnung unter den europäischen Regierungen treffen. Nur durch den Austritt Grossbritanniens dank Brexit ist Europa überhaupt in der Lage, solche Vorschläge zu erwägen. Sollte der Brexit scheitern und Grossbritannien Mitglied bleiben, würde jede Reformidee sowieso Makulatur werden.

   Wie auch immer Macrons Vorschläge im Einzelnen abgehandelt werden: betrüblich ist, dass die Franzosen in Berlin mit Worten abgespeist werden. Man sollte meinen, dass das Brexit-Getöse die beiden grossen Länder enger zusammen geführt hat, doch es bleibt bei wohlfeilen Solidaritäts-Beteuerungen. Diesmal ist Berlin der Bremser: es könnte auch einmal anders kommen: dass Deutschland Reformen will und Paris abwinkt.

   Deutschland war einmal ein Motor Europas. Es gab das Deutschland der Adenauers und der Kohls. Wo ist es geblieben?

   Als das Land wiedervereinigt wurde, zog die Hauptstadt von Bonn nach Berlin um. Viele fanden das bedenklich, fürchteten den genius loci, die Wiedergeburt des Grossmacht-Gehabes und des Nationalismus. Es ist an der Zeit, darüber nachzudenken, ob wir nicht schon in diese Falle geraten sind.

   Adenauer und Kohl waren West- und Süddeutsche. Heute regiert in Berlin Nord- und Ostdeutschland. Fehlt den Nordlichtern das Gefühl für die Gemeinsamkeit mit Frankreich, mit den lateinischen Nachbarn? Man mag über Helmut Kohl denken wie man will, aber er wäre wahrscheinlich ein besserer Partner Frankreichs in der heutigen Konstellation. Er würde dieser Koalition der Erbsenzähler (oder auf alt-preussisch: der Korinthenkacker) in Berlin ein klares Ja zu Macron abringen. Er würde das Zeitfenster als solches erkennen, wie er es ja auch 1989/90 erkannt hat.

   Vielleicht ist das Erbe Kohls nicht ganz vergessen. Die Dame mit dem komplizierten Namen kommt aus einem Bundesland, das eine gemeinsame Geschichte mit Frankreich hat, in dem es sogar ein Dorf namens Beaumarais gibt. Aber auch das Münsterland und das Sauerland sind nicht weit von Frankreich entfernt. Für Macron und Europa kommt das vermutlich zu spät.

Heinrich von Loesch