Quotulatiousness

July 20, 2020

To Save the World Takes Only One Good Man | The Cuban Missile Crisis | Day 13

TimeGhost History
Published 19 Jul 2020

On Sunday, 28 October, 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis comes to an end to end all things, and almost everything. Only one young man, Vasili Arkhipov will stand between humanity and nuclear armageddon.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kaminski

Colorizations:
– Carlos Ortega Pereira (BlauColorizations) – https://www.instagram.com/blaucoloriz…

Sources:
http://www.jproc.ca/crypto/hotline.html

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Cold Eyes” – Elliot Holmes
– “From the Depths” – Walt Adams
– “Moving to Disturbia” – Experia
– “When They Fell” – Wendel Scherer
– “Under the Dome” – Philip Ayers
– “Scope” – Got Happy
– “Symphony of the Cold-Blooded” – Christian Andersen
– “City Night Lights” – Elliot Holmes
– “Secret Cargo” – Craft Case
– “Too Young for This Shirt” – Elliot Holmes
– “Juvenile Delinquent” – Elliot Holmes
– “Drifting Emotions 3” – Gavin Luke

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
59 minutes ago (edited)
When we recorded this the first time, we didn’t have the chance to release these day by day. It took us almost half a year from when we had the idea until the last episode came out. We still felt that it was a revelation to see it chronologically. For me as writer it was in any case a deep dive into a story that I thought I knew, but rediscovered by reassembling the source documents in the exact order things happened. I learnt new aspects and gained an incredibly more detailed understanding of both the events and the people involved. But today, on Sunday July 19, 2020 it is the fourteenth day that both Indy, Astrid and I watch the remade episodes completed as they are released every day, I haven’t even watched this last episode yet, and even though I know exactly what is going to happen, I’m excited. This is crazy, crazy stuff.

And now, the three of us are sitting in the garden in Bavaria preparing to shoot the next months shows. And when we look back and talk about it it we’re all so glad that we got the chance to make this even better. Astrid could go full out on the set, and do even more with Indy’s costume. We had fun adding drama with the light. Indy make the delivery even better by changing the tenses to the present and altering the script slightly so that it felt more immediate. But perhaps more than anything, we could get more, better archive, get our editors added touch, and rethink the music score so that it was more consistent and period appropriate.

We also want to take this moment to thank:
The TimeGhost Army – it is your membership that enabled us to improve to this level from 2017 until now – you are the souls of TimeGhost.
Wieke, who directed the post-production and put his personal flair into it – especially grateful for the choice of music.
Daniel and Karolina who did a fantastic job on the editing.
All of our colorizers that made the portraits come alive in technicolor splendor (OK, OK… RGB splendor, but same, same)
Marek who sound engineered and made it sound so much better than what I managed in the first round.
Joram who made sure that we had all the publishing in order so that it worked day by day.

And all of the rest of the TimeGhost team that as usual had their hands full with this and all the mad stuff we do.

For Astrid, Indy and myself,
I’m Spartacus.

July 19, 2020

Black Saturday, Nuclear War on Autopilot | The Cuban Missile Crisis | Day 12

TimeGhost History
Published 18 Jul 2020

On October 27, 1962 a deal to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis is ever so close, but then almost everything that can go wrong, goes wrong. The world is left teetering on the brink, and someone has to die.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kaminski

Colorizations:
– Carlos Ortega Pereira (BlauColorizations) – https://www.instagram.com/blaucoloriz…
– Daniel Weiss
– Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man) – https://instagram.com/artistic.man?

Sources:
From the Noun Project:
diary By Astoe
Handshake By priyanka
telegraph By Luke Anthony Firth

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Cold Eyes” – Elliot Holmes
– “Nightclub Standoff” – Elliot Holmes
– “From the Depths” – Walt Adams
– “When They Fell” – Wendel Scherer
– “Juvenile Delinquent” – Elliot Holmes
– “Kissed by Thunder” – Elliot Holmes

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
26 minutes ago
Just when everything looks OK again, the house of cards that the USSR and USA have built starts to crumble. To us in 2020 that should serve to remind us that words matter. Because that’s all it was to begin with — words like “give it to the Reds!” and “down with the Bourgeoisie!” But words easily become bluster, and bluster easily becomes action, and action is always hard to control.

Remembering the past so that we can learn from it, without ideological bias, without demagoguery, and proposing oversimplified solutions to complex problems. That is our mission here at TimeGhost Become a part of that effort by joining the TimeGhost Army at https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory or https://timeghost.tv

July 18, 2020

The Invasion of Cuba | The Cuban Missile Crisis I Day 11

TimeGhost History
Published 17 Jul 2020

On 26 October 1962, US President John F Kennedy at first continues to plan an invasion of Cuba, but while the politicians make new plans, their previous military plans take on a life of their own

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Spartacus Olsson, Jonas Klein & Karolina Dołęga
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations:
Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations, https://www.instagram.com/blaucoloriz…
Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man), https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…

Music:
“Try and Catch Us Now” – David Celeste
“Cold Eyes” – Elliot Holmes.mp3
“Under the Dome” – Philip Ayers
“Mexican Standoff” – Walt Adams
“Car Chase in Virginia” – White Bones
“When They Fell” – Wendel Scherer
“Moving to Disturbia” – Experia
“Kid Me Not” – Elliot Holmes
“From the Depths” – Walt Adams
“Nightclub Standoff” – Elliot Holmes
“Potential Redemption” – Max Anson

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

July 2, 2020

Kennedy, the Lying Politician | The Cuban Missile Crisis I Prelude 2

TimeGhost History
Published 1 Jul 2020

The Cold War grows gets more and more tense as both the USSR and the US try to get the upper hand through the volume of nuclear weapons and strategic launching sites – including Cuba.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kaminski

Colorizations:
– Carlos Ortega Pereira (BlauColorizations) – https://www.instagram.com/blaucoloriz…
– Daniel Weiss

Sources:
– New Georgia Encyclopedia

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Cold Eyes” – Elliot Holmes
– “Juvenile Delinquent” – Elliot Holmes
– “Nightclub Standoff” – Elliot Holmes
– “Scope” – Got Happy
– “Zoot Suit” – Elliot Holmes
– “Car Chase in Virginia” – White Bones
– “When They Fell” – Wendel Scherer
– “Kissed by Thunder” – Elliot Holmes

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

February 2, 2018

Castro’s son “Fidelito” is dead

Filed under: Americas — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

BBC News just reported:

The 68-year-old son of Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, Fidel Ángel Castro Díaz-Balart, has died in Havana after taking his own life, according to state media.

He was found on Thursday morning and is said to have suffered from depression.

Popularly known as “Fidelito”, he was first born son of the former president, who died in November 2016.

Castro Díaz-Balart worked as a nuclear physicist and an adviser to the Council of the State of Cuba.

November 29, 2016

Justin Trudeau’s 15 minutes of internet fame

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In his statement on the death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went unexpectedly viral and his phrasing was turned into a hilarious Twitter hashtag: #TrudeauEuologies. In the National Post, Colby Cosh sums up the responses:

The Prime Minister has received a thousand-bomber raid’s worth of invective for his formal statement on the death of Fidel Castro, the communist dictator of Cuba who was an old friend of the Trudeau family. You probably need no reminding of the first sentence of the press release, already lampooned worldwide as a triumph of putrid euphemism: “While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante’.”

Habitual readers will know that when I see a thousand people gathering stones to throw at one, I try to see things from the side of the one. So my first impulse was to search for even a half-satisfactory justification of the PM’s statement. Alas, nothing came to hand. Just more rocks.

There is the “diplomacy is the art of lying about terrible things” defence: the idea that the interests of Canada might demand that Justin Trudeau use the opportunity presented by Fidel’s demise to suck up to his family and inner circle. This seems to me like an upside-down understanding of diplomacy. The Canadian government may sometimes be obliged to take, and even defend, morally ambiguous actions in the name of state interests. Merely telling sweet-sounding falsehoods about individuals is rarely involved. Like Trudeau’s acknowledgment that Castro was a “Comandante” — a pompous sadist who turned a beautiful country into a giant barracks — the diplomacy defence tacitly confesses the truth: Cuban government is lawless personal rule — as of now, the rule of a restless ghost who must be placated.

The statement might even be taken as a cryptic critique of the Castro regime, but there is no evidence the Prime Minister’s friendship with Castro was anything but genuine. When Trudeau writes “I know my father was very proud to call (Castro) a friend” he is stating fact. If the younger Trudeau does not believe that Castro was just a superhuman social reformer, and he really sees Cuba’s generations of exiles and political prisoners as more than hazy abstractions, then his family’s sucking up to Castro is fully conscious, fairy-tale evil, rather than the aftertaste of Fidel’s long-standing glamour cult among halfwit intellectuals.

Update: In Maclean’s, Terry Glavin twists the knife:

It was bound to happen sooner or later.

Ever since his election as Canada’s Prime Minister last October, Justin Trudeau has revelled in global tributes, raves and swoons. He’s the Disney prince with the trippy dance moves, the groovy Haida tattoo and the gender-balanced cabinet. He’s the last best hope for globalization, the star attraction at the Pride parades, the hero of the Paris Climate Summit, the guy everyone wants a selfie with.

Trudeau made himself synonymous with Canada. He made Canada cool again. It was fun while it lasted.

By the early hours of Saturday morning, Havana time, Trudeau was an international laughingstock. Canada’s “brand,” so carefully constructed in Vogue photo essays and Economist magazine cover features, seemed to suddenly implode into a bonspiel of the vanities, with humiliating headlines streaming from the Washington Post to the Guardian, and from Huffington Post to USA Today.

It was Trudeau’s maudlin panegyric on the death of Fidel Castro that kicked it off, and there is a strangely operatic quality to the sequence of events that brings us to this juncture. When Trudeau made his public debut in fashionable society 16 years ago, with his “Je t’aime, papa!” encomium at the gala funeral of his father in Montreal, Fidel Castro himself was there among the celebrities, as an honorary pallbearer, lending a kind of radical frisson to the event. Now it’s all come full circle.

May 15, 2014

The real Havana, outside “Cuba’s Elysium”

Filed under: Americas, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Michael Totten lied to Cuban immigration officials to get into Cuba. Then he went outside the area of Havana that the foreign tourists see. The movie Elysium is supposed to be about a dystopian LA in the future, where the plutocrats live in vast luxury aboard a satellite, looking down on the squalor of those left behind. Totten says this is a pretty accurate description of Cuba today:

Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of [Havana] looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana exists, though it makes up most of the city — tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a life in the ruins.

Marxists have ruled Cuba for more than a half-century now. Fidel Castro, Argentine guerrilla Che Guevara, and their 26th of July Movement forced Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959 and replaced his standard-issue authoritarian regime with a Communist one. The revolutionaries promised liberal democracy, but Castro secured absolute power and flattened the country with a Marxist-Leninist battering ram. The objectives were total equality and the abolition of money; the methods were total surveillance and political prisons. The state slogan, then and now, is “socialism or death.”

Cuba was one of the world’s richest countries before Castro destroyed it — and the wealth wasn’t just in the hands of a tiny elite. “Contrary to the myth spread by the revolution,” wrote Alfred Cuzan, a professor of political science at the University of West Florida, “Cuba’s wealth before 1959 was not the purview of a privileged few … Cuban society was as much of a middle-class society as Argentina and Chile.” In 1958, Cuba had a higher per-capita income than much of Europe. “More Americans lived in Cuba prior to Castro than Cubans lived in the United States,” Cuban exile Humberto Fontova, author of a series of books about Castro and Guevara, tells me. “This was at a time when Cubans were perfectly free to leave the country with all their property. In the 1940s and 1950s, my parents could get a visa for the United States just by asking. They visited the United States and voluntarily returned to Cuba. More Cubans vacationed in the U.S. in 1955 than Americans vacationed in Cuba. Americans considered Cuba a tourist playground, but even more Cubans considered the U.S. a tourist playground.” Havana was home to a lot of that prosperity, as is evident in the extraordinary classical European architecture that still fills the city. Poor nations do not — cannot — build such grand or elegant cities.

[…]

Cubans in the hotel industry see how foreigners live. The government can’t hide it without shutting the hotels down entirely, and it can’t do that because it needs the money. I changed a few hundred American dollars into convertible pesos at the front desk. The woman at the counter didn’t blink when I handed over my cash — she does this all day — but when she first got the job, it must have been shattering to make such an exchange. That’s why the regime wants to keep foreigners and locals apart.

Tourists tip waiters, taxi drivers, tour guides, and chambermaids in hard currency, and to stave off a revolt from these people, the government lets them keep the additional money, so they’re “rich” compared with everyone else. In fact, they’re an elite class enjoying privileges — enough income to afford a cell phone, go out to restaurants and bars, log on to the Internet once in a while — that ordinary Cubans can’t even dream of. I asked a few people how much chambermaids earn in tips, partly so that I would know how much to leave on my dresser and also to get an idea of just how crazy Cuban economics are. Supposedly, the maids get about $1 per day for each room. If they clean an average of 30 rooms a day and work five days a week, they’ll bring in $600 a month — 30 times what everyone else gets. “All animals are equal,” George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, his allegory of Stalinism, “but some animals are more equal than others.” Only in the funhouse of a Communist country is the cleaning lady rich compared with the lawyer. Yet elite Cubans are impoverished compared with the middle class and even the poor outside Cuba.

March 16, 2010

Trudeau’s part in Cuba’s economic non-liberation

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, Economics, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

William Watson mentions, in a review of Just Watch Me, volume 2 of a Pierre Trudeau biography:

But to me the strangest and most alarming passage was this one, on page 617. Referring to the optimal speed of transition for countries exiting communism, English writes: “Trudeau’s concerns about making haste too quickly, with potentially disastrous results for the health of any society, were apparent in the mid-Nineties, when Castro’s Cuba, reeling from the impact of the abrupt end of financial support from the Soviet Union, considered opening up its rigid state socialist system. Because of its historic economic ties with Cuba, Canada became involved in discussions with the Cuban government. James Bartleman, then the chief foreign policy advisor to prime minister Jean Chrétien, later indicated that Castro abandoned his plan to loosen socialist restraints after a conversation with Trudeau, who cautioned him about its impact on the social health of his country. No record of Trudeau’s conversation is available, but Bartleman’s account rings true because of Trudeau’s friendship with Castro and his respect for the gains achieved by Cuba in the areas of health and education.”

Fidel must have been deeply grateful for Trudeau’s advice; the Cuban people, not so much.

It must be said that Castro probably welcomed Trudeau’s advice partly because it aligned closely with his preferences anyway . . .

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