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COCO CHANEL WAS DEFINITELY A NAZI | Messy Nessy Chic Messy Nessy Chic
Wow.
“In documents unearthed by author Hal Vaughan, it was revealed that Chanel used her ‘Aryan rights’ to take full advantage of the Nazi seizure of all Jewish-owned property and businesses.”
“At some point, Chanel ceased to be the glamorous Hotel Ritz entertainer of Nazi officers and profiter of Jewish suffering, and became a Nazi officer herself.
As the paid agent of General Walter Schellenberg, chief of SS intelligence, Chanel’s secret identity was Abwehr Agent 7124, code name “Westminster”, as discovered in the archive research for Vaughan’s book, Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War.”
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who is “central” to a scene/genre
I posted this on my fb after reading this account of a music scene I’ve been involved in for a long time. Since before it was known as a scene. And wherein I have played with and/or booked almost everyone mentioned since 2006. The account (written by a woman) focuses almost entirely on the male players (despite many women being involved), through I’m sure no conscious decision. This is so familiar to me from music journalism and music scenes in general. I’m including some of the comments’ interesting discussions of issues here, to bring it out further:
I’m pondering how women’s contributions to music are so often overlooked and fall out of accounts of music scenes. What does it mean to be “central” to a scene, or “behind the scenes” to be a “real” artist in a scene? I get that it’s not only about making or playing music, it’s about *becoming known as an important person* making/playing that music. But that means people besides the audiences who might love your dj skills in the moment have to take you seriously - the people who write the accounts, the journalism, the histories.
Being taken seriously by them requires, I think, that you fit into a narrative which wasn’t written with women in mind. The participation and contributions that women make (not because of biology, but because of the social aspect of music scenes) are sometimes different (i.e. women work ‘behind the scenes’ in music all the time). and other times are not different but are *seen* differently.
COMMENTER #1: Good question. interesting comments. what i see is that mainstream will always have these issues. also we need to start telling and writing our own stories.COMMENTER #2: I think about this a lot too. In experimental music, the people who get taken seriously have not only accompanied their works with strident manifestos, they’ve also been aggressive and confident self-promoters. This makes a real difference between getting recognized in your own time, or 20-50 years later, and these aren’t traditionally feminine qualities. The question of influence is a funny thing: the electronic music by women from 1940-1980 often sounds more modern, more in tune with the direction things went in, than any of the hallmark pieces of their male contemporaries, but their names aren’t as known. Play the pieces for students and they always agree the work by the Barrons / Oram / Radigue was clearly incredibly ‘influential’, but it’s taking forever for people to recognize the names! Its incredibly frustrating, but at the same time, I see something intrinsic to the work that was being done and a sign of how much of a difference this music offers us.Me: yes COMMENTER#1 unfortunately it isn’t only mainstream. I see this in every scene that is male-dominated no matter how underground… Good point COMMENTER #2 and it goes beyond promotion… often it seems people simply don’t hear women when they say/do stuff. I’ve had it happen countless times where I’ve been in a music conversation and said something, and nobody responded and then 2 minutes later a guy says the same thing and everyone is like “oh great point.” And the same with artistic productions & performances - where it even blows away the audience and the other artists, but when it comes to writing it up, somehow it doesn’t “stick” in people’s minds.COMMENTER #3:hire women and pay them, its pretty simpleMe: that’s a start. But also, women get hired and paid and play.. and then later fall out of the histories, narratives and reports, so when you read or hear about music genres & scenes it’s as if women were never there. So I’m also interested in how people see the “centers” or the “backbones” of music scenes.Also bless up Dj Bent on Twitter for raising this directly.
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The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro, by Frederick Douglass
A speech given at Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852….
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.-The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fa thers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.
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(STAUGHTON LYND GIVES US THE HISTORY. FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO DON’T KNOW HIM, PLEASE LEARN. he’s 82, has been there through everything with soul intact and enlarged and shared with all who meet him.)
“While I have all my life been personally committed to nonviolence, I have never attempted to impose this personal belief on movements in which I took part. Perhaps this is because as an historian I perceive certain situations for which I have not been able to imagine a nonviolent resolution.
The most challenging of these is slavery. At the time of the American Revolution there were about 600,000 slaves in the British colonies that became the United States. In the Civil War, more than 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed. It was literally true that, as President Lincoln put it in his Second Inaugural Address, every drop of blood drawn by the lash had to be “sunk” (repaid) by a drop of blood drawn by the sword.
Similarly, I cannot imagine telling Zapatistas that they should not be prepared to defend themselves if attacked by the Mexican army or paramilitaries. I believe that self-defense in these circumstances meets the criteria for a “just” use of violence set out by Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador in his Pastoral Letters.
My fundamental concern is that the rhetoric of the Occupy Movement includes two propositions in tension with each other. We appear to say, on the one hand, that we must seek consensus, but on the other hand, that once a General Assembly is over individuals and grouplets are free to do their own thing.”
Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves!
