Peeking into the rock

I keep running into assertions like this(actual quote):
<i>When I was growing up, there was no Estonia, except in historical reference. The map at that time showed the gigantic USSR, stretching from East Germany through twelve time zones, so far to the east it bumped into the boundary of the west, across the Aleutians from Alaska.</i>.

It's not true.  There was an Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic.  It was on the maps in my atlas.

And like this(rememberered paraphrase):
<i>The Soviets tried to obliterate the Czech language, but they didn't succeed</i>

Again, not true.  One of the things that the Soviet Union did as a matter of policy was to cultivate national and minority languages.  It was a crucial part of domestic and foreign policy.  It was especially true in any place where the logical alternative language was German.

Let's accuse governments of the crimes they did commit, and not the ones they didn't.

So, I was aware that Ernst Busch had an ouevre beyond Six Songs For Democracy , but in spite of the fact that hearing his voice can evoke my whole childhood, from the linoleum on the floor to the tubes in the amplifier and the ravelling straw over the single giant speaker, I had never sought out the rest of that ouevre. Ernst Busch was a popular German Commnist performer, who sang a lot of lyrics by Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht , including "The Song of the United Front," which I used to sing all the time as a kid. It's a great song to sing while marching determinedly around the living room, and its lyrics are unassailable:

and just because he's human
a man would like a little bite of bread
he wants no servants under him
and no boss over his head!

Yesterday there was for some reason dueling war-songs earworms at personhead James Nicoll's livejournal, which sent me off to collect something from the Six Songs for Democracy album to share, and I discovered that not only is there a large existing trove of Ernst Busch's rousing antifascist anthems, but the people who have put them on to Youtube have matched them with images that make them over into contemporary commentary.

Now I have to go take a nap. The dogs are incapable of letting me sleep for more than three hours at a shot.

Frank came in and asked me was he related to Johann Trollmann, the German boxer. I said "Heck if I know. There's a lot of Johann Trollmanns around." So we went looking and well I don't know about being related to the guy, but his story was a punch in the gut. In the pictures he has that Trollman mouth, but that could just be a coincidence, because if they are related, it's probably pretty distant. The Trollmans of which Frank is a member left Glogon just in time for the patriarch of that family to run to San Francisco to participate in the rebuilding after the 1906 Fire and Earthquake. There is no family rumor about being Sinto (a word I had never encountered for German Gypsy), but a lot of people will suppress Romani heritage if they can.

If you don't like to follow links, here's Johann's story in brief: he was a boxer, born in 1907 in Hanover. You can see where this is going. He ran into a lot of discrimination in amateur boxing circles so he went pro in 1929. He beat two of the Nazi's favorites and they took his title away from him both times, to the disgust of the boxing fans. Finally, amid rising death threats (so fierce that he divorced his wife so she could take another name and get away from him), he agreed to the conditions forced on him for a fight to retain his title: he agreed to abandon his dancing style that the Nazis called "gypsy unpredictability." He showed up with white makeup all over himself and his hair dyed blond and caricatured "Aryan" fighting style by standing totally still while the Nazi favorite pounded him for 5 rounds until he collapsed.

It goes downhill from there. He died in Neuengamme.

This man was my brother, whether or not he was a cousin.