Hiding From and Making History

Managed to catch to really interesting programmes on ARTE last night, in spite of the problems with my cable receiver. Since I have had it, it seems to have a mind of its own or no mind at all it! After two months of problems I finally contacted the call centre yesterday. The lady told me to reboot the system, something the user manual does not. Of course, while I was speaking to her on the phone the box behaved itself and rebooted promptly. So imagine my annoyance when I wanted to watch something last night and the box was in one of it 8% status, “Please Wait” phases. I rebooted it several times. I had actually give up any hope of the stupid thing working last night, when 15 minutes into the programme I wanted to see it managed to connect to the server. Baa Humbug!

The first programme was rather disturbing. It was a documentary how the German Secret Service in the 50's and 60's made use of operatives who had been active Nazis in the Second World War. Apparently these peoples’ histories were not checked too carefully. The Cold War was in the hot phase and enemies on the left (the Soviet Union/Communists) were considered worse than the old enemies/criminals on the right (Nazis). The documentary revealed how some of these Nazi's assisted southern American dictatorships, even teaching them some of the Nazi interrogation methods. As I said rather shocking! Apparently the German Secret Service will complete its own review of these events by 2016. This is all the more relevant with the current trial of suspected Neo-Nazis in Munich that has been going on for the last 21 days.

The second programme documented the role of the UN, in helping to establish the Republic of Southern Sudan (RSS). The Southern Sudan gained independence in 2011. The UN project was a kind of “How do you build a country from scratch?” One of the things that struck me was that some of the politicians of RSS did not appreciate the UN’s input. I have often wondered what the UN actually did and was left feeling rather impressed with the expertise and dedication of the UN team.