Fanfic, July 20th ponderings, and some stuff about those 60s

Firstly, today is hobsonphile's birthday, and if you haven't already, hop over to her lj and congratulate her. She's a delightful person, the world's greatest Vir fan, and my contribution to her birthday was a Vir vignette, of course.

Secondly, having seen one season of DS9 has now prompted deborah_judge, she of the terrific Lennier stories, to write her first DS9 fanfic, a look at Odo and the Great Link. Odo fans, skywaterblue especially: you must read it!

Thirdly, I finally broke down and bought space for 50 icons. There were just too many I aquired during recent months and did not want to lose. Today's icon was made by spikewriter and celebrates silent movies in general and both Gloria Swanson and Sunset Boulevard, about which I've written at length in the past, in particular. (Points to moviebuffs who recognise the other ladies, all stars of their age.)

Fourthly, browsing through English-language newspaper websites, I found it odd that there is little to no notice of today's anniversary. This article was about the only one I could find. If you speak German, otoh, you've been reading about said anniversary for days now. July 20th, 1944 was the most famous plot to kill Hitler, Operation Valkyrie, took place - and failed. The memory of the conspirators has undergone some severe ups and downs. Immediately after WWII, their widows didn't get army pensions, and towns refused to name any places or streets after them, still calling them traitors. Then, in the later 50s, they were suddenly declared to be the representatives of "the other Germany", the true predecessors of the West German Republic, etc. Later on, the fact that several of them had been delighted at the start of WWII and had never been believers in democracy exactly, rather going for some idyllic quasi-monarchic Germany that never was made them suspicious for the 70s.

These days, the adjective most commonly heard in connection with them is "tragic". The July 20th conspiracy was the big might-have-been in WWII history, because as opposed to all the other assassination attempts (and there were several), this one also was meant to be a coup d'état, and organized as such. (Which would have been necessary if the death of Hitler was to have any real and immediate effects other than make the Nazi hierarchy fight it out for the succession. Georg Elser, a brave carpenter, tried to kill Hitler in 1939 all on his own, and had also an genuine chance at succeeding - it was sheer bad luck that Hitler left far earlier than he was supposed to - but if his bomb had killed Hitler, WW II and the holocaust probably still would have taken place, only with someone else at the top.) There is the bitter historical irony that if those officers HAD succeeded in their coup d'état, then there probably would have been a legend in the making along the lines of "we'd have won the war if only...". I doubt that the staunch anti-militarism that developed in Germany over the last decades would have developed in quite that way. But think of the lives saved. How many died between July 20th, 1944, and May 8th, 1945? Both on the front and in the concentration camps?

Those conspirators who weren't executed on the same day, like Stauffenberg, were put on trial. This was filmed, as Goebbels originally intended to use said show trials for his propaganda. But the accused were so dignified and the judge, the infamous Roland Freissler (most notorious of all Nazi judges) so vicious and intemperate in his shouting insults and hate at them that even Goebbels realised these recordings would work against him, and so they vanished into vaults. It's impossible to see them now and not feel sadness and admiration. Yes, these men weren't saints, and several of them supported the regime early on. But they came to realise its true nature, they knew what they were risking and they still acted because they believed Hitler had to be stopped, and then they died for it.

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Meanwhile, what I did find in the British papers was that Blair himself indulged in a round of bashing the '60s, a sport more usual among US neocons, I understand). Leaving aside the 40s, has there ever been a decade so demonized and glorified at the same time?

(Demonized in political rethorics, glamourized by by the sheer weight of iconage it produced - from the Beatles to Woodstock, from Martin Luther King to the first demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, etc.)

Several prominent figures of the time rounded up a Sixties' defense. I was also reminded of a rather sarcastic passage in Bill Clinton's memoirs (Clinton being aware that he himself often was called the embodiment of those vile 60s and being somewhat defensive of the period as a consequence), re: Newt Gingrich, which went like this:

Then he (Newt Gingrich) said that Democratic values were responsible for the lage number of out-of-wedlock births to teen mothers, whose babies should be taken form them and put into orphanages. When Hillary questioned whether infants separated form their mothers would really be better off, he said she should watch the 1938 movie Boys Town, in which poor boys are raised in a Catholic orphanage, well before the dreaded 1960s ruined us all.

Gingrich even blamed the Democrats and their "permissive" values for creating a moral climate that encouraged a troubled South Carolina woman, Susan Smith, to drown her two young sons in October 1994. when it came out that Smith might have been unbalanced because she had been sexually abused as a child by her ultra-conservative stepfather, who was on the board of his local chapter of the Christian Coalition, Gingrich was unfazed. All sins, even those committed by conservatives, were caused by the moral relativism the Democrats had imposed on America since the 1960s.

I kept waiting for Gingrich to explain how the Democrats' moral bankruptcy had corrupted the Nixon and Reagan administrations and had led to the crimes of Watergate and Iran-Contra. I'm sure he would have found a way. When he was on a roll, Newt was hard to stop.