Your pictures are great. I was excited to see that you are in Krakow – my dad and I traveled to a little town in the Carpathian mountains not far from where you are. I am a friend of Smith’s and met you once (you are great) at the opening where he had his own work for sale.
First: It seems like Smith is getting cross examined in the “comments” for what he said about America – the torturing, the killing and all of that. As for me, I am surprised anyone that knows him would question his integrity of purpose. Actually, it would not matter whether Smith passed all of his critic’s criteria for sincerity or not – Jeez!
Why be prompted to turn on Smith? Why not grill the government that stepped outside of the society of civilised countries? Why not look beneath the government’s publicly stated motives?
The fact that you are in Krakow, in the general area of the world that saw wave upon wave of horror during and after the 2nd world war, makes me think of a tragedy similar to the Holocaust. When the Soviets took control of Western Ukraine, part of the area formerly known as Austria-Hungary, Stalin set out to break the peasant class. 100,000 people were killed, reduced to skeletons in the streets, because he took their stored food and ultimately the seed for future crops.
Then, to ensure control, all of the “Intelligentsia” were systematically rounded up, tortured and killed. My grandma’s second husband was a small town mayor. He and others stood within a barbed wire enclosure, facing a firing squad. They decided to break and run, knowing, this way, some would survive. He found a stormwater pipe and crawled his escape. He was paranoid that the kgb would find him, even in the US, until the day he died.
This was after the Germans were defeated and the US considered the Soviets to be an ally. Nobody in the US knew what was happening. Just as when the Jews were being imprisoned and killed, the world was not fully aware of what was happening. Perhaps people wondered, and felt uneasy, but they did not have complete awareness of the horrors that were happening.
So let’s shout about it, write about it, paint about it, what ever it takes for the nicey nice complacent people in America to understand that terrible things are going on – that optimistic patriotism doesn’t make everything all better.
Hello Lady,
Your pictures are great. I was excited to see that you are in Krakow – my dad and I traveled to a little town in the Carpathian mountains not far from where you are. I am a friend of Smith’s and met you once (you are great) at the opening where he had his own work for sale.
First: It seems like Smith is getting cross examined in the “comments” for what he said about America – the torturing, the killing and all of that. As for me, I am surprised anyone that knows him would question his integrity of purpose. Actually, it would not matter whether Smith passed all of his critic’s criteria for sincerity or not – Jeez!
Why be prompted to turn on Smith? Why not grill the government that stepped outside of the society of civilised countries? Why not look beneath the government’s publicly stated motives?
The fact that you are in Krakow, in the general area of the world that saw wave upon wave of horror during and after the 2nd world war, makes me think of a tragedy similar to the Holocaust. When the Soviets took control of Western Ukraine, part of the area formerly known as Austria-Hungary, Stalin set out to break the peasant class. 100,000 people were killed, reduced to skeletons in the streets, because he took their stored food and ultimately the seed for future crops.
Then, to ensure control, all of the “Intelligentsia” were systematically rounded up, tortured and killed. My grandma’s second husband was a small town mayor. He and others stood within a barbed wire enclosure, facing a firing squad. They decided to break and run, knowing, this way, some would survive. He found a stormwater pipe and crawled his escape. He was paranoid that the kgb would find him, even in the US, until the day he died.
This was after the Germans were defeated and the US considered the Soviets to be an ally. Nobody in the US knew what was happening. Just as when the Jews were being imprisoned and killed, the world was not fully aware of what was happening. Perhaps people wondered, and felt uneasy, but they did not have complete awareness of the horrors that were happening.
So let’s shout about it, write about it, paint about it, what ever it takes for the nicey nice complacent people in America to understand that terrible things are going on – that optimistic patriotism doesn’t make everything all better.
Keep up the blogging, I’m hooked.
K