In May and June 1941, the Soviets and their collaborators carried out the fourth wave of deportations of Polish citizens from occupied eastern Poland to camps, collective farms, exile villages and various outposts of the gulag deep in the USSR.
After signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, and then invading and occupying eastern Poland in 1939 - while the Germans invaded and occupied western Poland - the Soviets arrested hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens over the next two years and transported them to remote regions of Siberia, Kazakhstan and northern Russia in overcrowded cattle cars.
Most of the deportees were women and children.
Those who survived the journey were then used as slave labour, and thousands died subsequently from a combination of hunger, exhaustion and disease.
The mass deportations to what became known as nieludzka ziemia ("the inhuman land") took place in four waves between February 1940 and June 1941.
The first wave began on 10th February 1940, a few weeks before the Soviet NKVD carried out what became known as the Katyń massacre. The second wave began on 13th April 1940, when the massacre had already begun.
The first two mass deportations included the families of the Katyń massacre victims - 8000 Polish army officers, 6000 police officers and thousands of university lecturers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, civic leaders, politicians, government officials, priests and other members of the “bourgeoisie”.
The third wave took place between June and July 1940.
In 1941, after Hitler had turned on Stalin and launched Operation Barbarossa, a fragile “amnesty” was declared for the Polish deportees, and approximately 120,000 of them subsequently managed to escape from the USSR in 1942 with the Anders Army. They were forced into a life of exile after the war.
Other survivors eventually made it back to communist Poland, where they were forced into silence for decades, until Poland finally regained its independence in 1989….
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(aka I come to realize my experience is about the curse of knowledge and the bliss of ignorance and that I should find a different hobby than reading and thinking about fascism and anarcho-capitalism (like reading the Che Guevara diary my friend borrowed me and thinking about communism and normal anarchism instead))
Content note: minor scene spoilers but not the ending for Mickey 17 below the cut, featuring somewhat graphic discussion of practices in the Auschwitz concentration camps, the Holocaust/Shoah overall and the Katyn massacre later on in the post because I compare watching Mickey 17 with my experience watching The Zone of Interest and watching Katyń
It seems like everyone here on tumblr, one of the friends I went to see Mickey 17 with and all the people who write reviews for it online are convinced that Kenneth Marshall is supposed to be a stand in for Trump and while that may be one way to read the movie it's a pretty boring one and in my opinion part of the reason why it's getting so many mixed to bad reviews which it doesn't fully deserve.
Yeah the pacing of the movie is pretty awful at times, especially the exposition drags on and on. Yeah, the humor doesn't really land; at least for me it's neither dark nor absurd enough to actually be that funny, but maybe that's also due to the fact that it genuinely scared me for the first third of the movie; because none of this seemed like fiction to me. A lot of these ideas aren't futuristic metaphors anymore, they're being planned in reality right now. You just have to stop thinking of Marshall as Trump and start seeing Marshall as a mix of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and the plot becomes terrifying.
This movie is specifically about wealth and power; about how capitalism supports fascism, not about Trump or the attempted assassination on him.
And since Musk just retweeted another Holocaust denial post this weird connection that my brain has made between Mickey 17 and The Zone of Interest/Katyń seems somewhat relevant, but more about that later.
I'm pretty sure the hand sign they're doing at the start (in my memory after Mickey signed the contract, but I might be misremembering, but then definitely later when they're on the shuttle that brings them to the planet and are discussing the no sex rule and the white supremacy birth stuff) is supposed to be a stand in for the white power sign, but it also just happens to be the wolf salute, which admittedly is niche knowledge you probably only have if you're like me and spend a lot of your time keeping up with right-wing extremism or Neo-Nazi conspiracy theorists like Attila Hildmann and which definitely wasn't intended as such by Bong Joon Ho.
There's so many other examples that are reminiscent of the things billionaires do or are planning to do that perfectly fit into white supremacy and Nazi ideology that I wanted to discuss here but I've been thinking about this and writing this post for four days now and at this point I don't trust my memory with this anymore. I had a whole point about the sauces representing the objects Nazis created out of the human remains of the prisoners and not necessarily imperialist oil claims (though the movie definitely also is about imperialism) like someone on tvtropes.org wrote, about how water and thus liquids in general are luxury goods, but I'm not too confident about that now that my memory of the movie is deteriorating. So I'm not gonna continue this here, I just want to be able to publish this post so I can finally stop thinking about it for just a second.
If you want to read an actual good complete analysis just read someone else's or check out the tvtropes.org entry, idk.
What initially compelled me to write this post was that this whole experience reminded me of when I was watching The Zone of Interest with a friend: I sat in horror looking at the opening shot because I instantly recognized that bit of wall as part of Auschwitz because I stood in front of a wall just like that when I visited Auschwitz, while my friend next to me had no reaction until the camera panned out and revealed the whole height of the wall including the barbed wire and garden set up.
There's a lot of scenes like that in The Zone of Interest that you don't really get the severity of unless you have background knowledge about how Auschwitz was structured and operating. Take the scene where Hedwig Höß receives the watches for example; I don't remember there being context clues that these are watches from prisoners that got selected for her at the Kanada warehouses; so to someone who has no knowledge about Auschwitz she might as well be receiving an order she placed at some jewelry shop.
In that way ignorance is bliss, yeah, but it also robs you of a full understanding which I think is the case for many people who watched Mickey 17 and thought it's about Trump. I'm not saying that to gatekeep or to say I'm smarter than you. I'm someone who has no real pop culture knowledge, who constantly has references flying over her head. I'm saying sometimes you need additional knowledge to fully understand art, and if you don't realize that you might end up watching something and coming away with the feeling that it was bad or boring or had no point. And thinking Mickey 17 is about Trump does make the movie pretty boring.
Similarly this experience reminded me of when I thought it was a good idea to watch Katyń on a random weekday night: I knew what the movie would be about, I knew what would happen, I had read about the Katyn massacre, but to me there's a noticeable difference between reading about something and seeing something in visual art, because my own visual imagination is pretty bad. So after I had watched Katyń I couldn't sleep for hours and I had classes early in the morning the next day. The same thing happened with Mickey 17 except luckily I'm still on my semester break and had nowhere to be and could spend half of the night drafting whatever the hell this is.
All in all great movie, just some aspects of it might not live up to your expectations if you're going into this expecting another Parasite or if you're basing your expectations on the trailer. Which the adults of the 6-8 year old children who sat in our screening also had to realize after the movie turned to exploring the morality of death and dying as the main topic. They left very quickly after that, but these poor kids...
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Russians keep sinking lower and lower. Now they are threating to destroy the Katyn massacre burial because Poland has been helping Ukraine resist the invasion and genocide.
Link to the video
My translation of the audio to english below:
On Sunday at 15:00, two columns of heavy construction equipment arrived to the Katyn memorial. It is a burial place of polish officers, who are officially said to have been shot in 1940 by the soviet NKVD. The colums lined up near the entrance and exit, afterwards two excavators drove to the “KATYN” inscription and demonstrated the intention of tearing it down. Afterwards, 30 unites of equipment have driven by. Around the same time a following address was shared through the social networks: “In the name of people of Smolensk and the whole russian nation, we call to ordinary polish people, since polish politicians are obsessed with russophobia and collusion with 21-century nazis and will not hear us. We are near Smolensk, on the Katyn memorial. This place is sacred for many polish people. Some of you have your ancestors buried here. We won’t be trying to figure out who and when has ~really~ ordered to shoot polish officers. We want to declare that we respect your relics located on our lands. Our construction equipment could destroy this memorial. However, we are people, not nazis. We won’t do it. We don’t make war with other people’s relics. It’s your politicians that are destroying monuments dedicated to the red army soldiers, the ones who died freeing Poland from nazis. Wake up, simple polish people”
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Some context, from Wikipedia:
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German forces.
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After the end of WW2, the Allies have forced Poland not to pursue justice for this crime soviet union commited against them, and allowed Poland to be occupied by the soviets without even inviting Polish government to the negotiations.
During the soviet rule the official version was that those officers were executed by the german nazis, who in turn tried to blame soviets. Despite overwhelming evidence that Katyn massacre was commited by the soviet side, modern russian historicans keep on trying to shrug the blame with the old tactic of muddling the discourse - “not everything is so clear” and “there are two sides to each story”.
(Bonus materials: this is the order to commit the massacre in question. Proposed by berya, signed by stalin personally)
Karol Edmund Wojtczak was a Polish military officer, murdered by Soviet troops in the Katyn Forest (1940) along with over 22,000 Polish prisoners of war. These victims were army officers, and reservists, including clergy, doctors, teachers and lawyers. They were executed as part of Stalin’s effort to crush the Polish people by killing Poland’s best and brightest leaders.
