Visiting Auschwitz

Today 27th January is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the media, as usual, commemorate the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated 6 million Jewish people, 200,000 Roma people, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

I think that the rhetoric that is usually adopted in commemorating this day, obscures partially what really happened in that period. It is really difficult to understand, at least till you have the opportunity to visit Auschwitz.

I live in Poland since over six years but just the last summer I have decided and planned to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp that is located in Oświęcim, 50km from Krakow.

Visiting Auschwitz should be definitely something everyone must do at least once in our own life. Because seeing all the shoes that where gathered by the people who arrived and died there, the grey hair and the amount of cups and glasses really make you realize the dimension of what happened.

When you arrive in the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) main entrance, the guide says that an estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, of whom at least 1.1 million died. And you start to think about those people in line after hours of traveling in a train and just waiting to die.

It is impossible to imagine living in the camp during the winter (where the temperature is constantly under zero), with no food, no warming clothes, nothing.

It is so hard to imagine that life, so impossible to realize how some people could survive, that words are simply not enough. You need to go there and see.

We assume that it will never happen again, but we forget easily. And it is happening now with Rohingya in Myanmar, it happened with Tutsi in Ruanda and with Bosniak in the Former Jugoslavia.

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How much do the promises of the Italian politicians cost?

This is an important year for Italy: in few weeks the Political Elections will take place. And the electoral campaign already started, with a bunch of unrealistic promises from the opponents.  

Renzi, former Prime Minister, is proposing - for instance - the abolition of the tax to the national public broadcasting company Rai. This would cost 1.8 billion Eur per year. The new left led by the current President of the Senate Grasso, is proposing instead the abolition of the University taxes, at the cost of almost 2 billion euros per year. Of course, those will be the first elections in which the generation born in 2000 will go to vote.

On the right side, we have seen the back on the political stage of the eternal outsider Silvio Berlusconi, who is proposing the abolition of almost all the taxes: for cars, for donations, for inheritance plus a new fiscal system of flat tax (40 billions). He and his alley - Lega Nord - are also proposing the abolition of the last pension reform, that will cost the impressive amount of 80 billions euro/year since 2025.

The Moviment 5 Stelle, that has good chances to win the elections, is proposing the creation of a "citizen income" that would cost 15 billions per year.

Politicians are doing to many promises that are unrealistic but they are not explain us how we can develop resources, work, wealth in a country that is in permanent decline since three decades. 

Political leadership is looking at the people who have interests to defend (pensions, salaries, properties,...) and they are not providing a vision of how we will handle our future. 

Italian electoral campaign is funny and desolately sad at the same time.

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If you are interested in the cost of the electoral promises, you can take a look at this article published by La Repubblica (sorry, in Italian).

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Once upon a time there was the Czechoslovakia

At the beginning of January fell the anniversary of the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. It happened 25 years ago, when after a political agreement between Prague and Bratislava, there was the creation of Czech Republic and Slovakia (united in the same entity since 1918).

It is strange to think about the "Velvet Divorce" now, also remembering that in a poll of September 1992, just the 37% of Slovaks and 36% of Czechs wanted the separation.

The story after the dissolution is clear: at the beginning Prague developed faster, but once Slovakia entered in the Eu, Bratislava became much more competitive, also adopting Euro.

It is interesting to notice that:

"While raw nationalism fueled the conflict in Yugoslavia, economics and inept leadership were the prime causes of Czechoslovakia’s schism—a dynamic that presages the struggle for independence in contemporary Catalonia, a region of Spain."  (From The Economist: The impact of Czechoslovakia’s split)

The parallel with what is going on in Barcelona is obvious. With not real and strong reasons, elites divided a big country. In Czechoslovakia there were no troubles, in Jugoslavia thousands of people died. But what is the point to be independent, if than you want be part of European Union anyway?

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Persepolis - what is going on in Iran

Iran is the second largest Country in the Middle East. It also has large reserves of fossil fuels – which include the world's largest natural gas supply and the fourth-largest proven oil reserves.

Iran is a major political and religious player in the area and it is normal that when a huge wave of protests affects the whole country like it happened in the last days, all the international attention is focused on understanding what is going on.

The famous picture of the girl who is protesting without dressing her hijab

The problem is that it is really difficult to understand this country full of contradictions and overall, with a huge control on the media from the State.

What I understood is that the protests have been pushed by the conservatives against the President Rohuani, but it has been quickly developed in a much wider protest against the corruption and the economic stagnation of the country.

What is interesting in those demonstrations is that they were not led by any political party but built up via social media. The protests involved also small cities, where people are not claiming for more freedom, but for more work and against the increase of the prices.

Even if it seems the central Government has been able to repress the demonstrations, it doesn't mean that the problems at the oring of it will disappear. We will see in the next months if those tensions will bring some important changes in Iran.

For further reference  I would suggest this article from Il Post (in Italian) and another from BBC very interesting as well.

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