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 „Neapolis 1944 m

 Autorius Keithas Lowe'as

 Martynas, 464 puslapiai, 35 doleriai

 Kai 1943 m. spalio 1 d. britų ir amerikiečių kariai įžengė į Neapolį, jie tapo naujais šimtų tūkstančių, pusiau badaujančių, civilių ir sužlugdyto miesto valdovais. Prieš pasitraukdami, vokiečių okupantai surengė tikslią trijų savaičių sabotažo ir vagysčių kampaniją. Jie pagrobė visą maistą ir degalus. Jie susprogdino miesto dujų, vandens ir nuotekų vamzdynus. Jie sunaikino uosto įrenginius ir didelę gretimo rajono dalį ir uoste sugriovė daugiau, nei 300 laivų. Jie sunaikino 75% pagrindinių tiltų, pavogė beveik 90% miesto sunkvežimių, autobusų ir tramvajų, nugriovė geležinkelio bėgius ir tunelius, visur paliko minų ir kitokius spąstus (Lietuvos valdžia jau perka tas minas (K.)).

 

 Neapolis pateko į anarchiją. Nustojo veikti policija, ugniagesiai, greitoji medicinos pagalba, paštas, telegrafas ir telefono tarnybos. Bankai, mokyklos ir teismai buvo uždaryti. Sąjungininkai pradėjo kariauti, bet tapo atsakingi už nugalėtų žmonių valdymą ir griuvėsių atstatymą. Jau ir taip labiausiai bombarduojamas Italijos miestas, Neapolis, kentėjo tolesnius kančias per pirmuosius šešis laisvės mėnesius: ekonomikos krizė, masinis badas, šiltinės protrūkis, žudynių banga, vagystės ir mafijos veikla – moralinis žlugimas, kai vyrai prostitucijavo žmonas, o motinos prostitucijavo savo dukteris.

 

 Apokaliptinės karo pasekmės Neapolyje sukūrė tris įspūdingus literatūros kūrinius. Britų žvalgybos pareigūno ir kelionių rašytojo Normano Lewiso kūrinys „Neapolis '44“ (1978 m.) buvo impresionistinis reportažas apie visuomenės žlugimą, ją užkariaujant. „Galerija“, 1947 m. buvęs žvalgybos pareigūnas Johnas Horne'as Burnsas, apibūdino armijos nuobodulį, baimę ir atsitiktinius nuotykius mieste, kuriame civilizacija „jau buvo mirusi“. „Oda“, 1949 m. fašistu tapusio rašytojo, tapusio komunistu, Curzio Malaparte'o romanas, buvo sąjungininkų okupacijos košmaras, kuriame degradacija klesti tarp „baisios dvokos, sklindančios iš daugybės šimtų lavonų, palaidotų po griuvėsiais“.

 

 Keitho Lowe'o „Neapolis 1944“ – pirmoji išsami gyvenimo Neapolyje vokiečių ir sąjungininkų okupacijos metais istorija anglų kalba. Ponas Lowe'as, kurio ankstesnėse knygose buvo studijos apie tiesioginius ir ilgalaikius Antrojo pasaulinio karo padarinius Europoje, naudoja sąjungininkų karinius įrašus ir italų pasakojimus, kad parodytų, kaip sąjungininkų pergalė šioje srityje lėmė etinį pralaimėjimą, pagrįstą vaizduotės ir, atsižvelgiant į šiuolaikinį karą, logistikos nesėkmėmis.

 

 Neapolis tapo pirmuoju miestu, kuriame sąjungininkai sužinojo, kad jie yra užkariautojai. Laikraščio „Stars and Stripes“ priešužkariavimo pradžiamokslis, kurį parašė, niekada Neapolio nematęs, seržantas, pristatė jį kaip „vieną iš originalių Europos „malonumų miestų“, kur žmonės „žvejoja, buriuoja ir geria vyną“. Straipsnio pavadinimas apvertė Gėtės patarimą turistui („Pamatyk Neapolį ir mirk“) į kareivio prioritetą: „Pamatyk Neapolį ir gyvenk“. Tikrasis Neapolis istoriškai buvo skurdus, perpildytas ir smurtingas. Po fašistinės vyriausybės žlugimo 1943 m. liepos mėn., atvykus vokiečių garnizonui rugsėjį ir prieš vokiečius nukreipto sukilimo to mėnesio pabaigoje, jis buvo daugiau, nei įprastai nesuvaldomas – tai buvo nepastebėtas epizodas, kurį ponas Lowe atgaivina.

 

 Pirmuoju iš daugelio klaidų Markas Clarkas, „garsiai tuščias“ ir nepatyręs amerikiečių vadas, surengė savo įėjimo paradą Garibaldi aikštėje miesto rytuose ir rado, vėliau jis rašė, gatves „praktiškai tuščias nuo civilių“. Minios būriavosi kitoje miesto pusėje, kur Neapolis dažniausiai priimdavo jo užkariautojus.

 

 Clarkas planavo Neapolio uostą paversti tiekimo centru Italijos kampanijai, o miestą – kurortu kariams, keliaujantiems į fronto liniją ir iš jos. Jo išradingi inžinieriai užtruko tik kelias dienas, kad sukurtų paskirstymo stotis ir laikinus geriamojo vandens vamzdynus. Užuot nutempę nuolaužas, jie padėjo veikti uostui, ant nuolaužų nutiesdami pėsčiųjų takus. Per mėnesį nuo išsivadavimo buvo sutvarkyta 80% Neapolio kanalizacijos. Ponas Lowe'as rašo, kad uostas „krovė daugiau tonažo, nei Niujorkas“, – „puikus pavyzdys to, ką galima pasiekti bendradarbiaujant anglo-amerikiečiams“. Tačiau Sąjungininkų karinės vyriausybės (AMG) civiliai administratoriai buvo „neparengti... nepakankamai aprūpinti personalu, nepakankamai finansuojami ir nepakankamai aprūpinti“. Anot vieno AMG pareigūno, jos vyrai buvo „gerai nusiteikę vidutinybės, neturintys politinės patirties, neturintys aiškaus plano ir neturintys tinkamos krypties“. Dauguma jų į Neapolį atvyko tik gruodžio mėn. Daugelis jų pakeliui pametė rašomąsias mašinėles.

 

 Sąjungininkų bombarduojami, o vėliau nuo vokiečių žiauriai nukentėję neapoliečiai dabar atsidūrė „pagauti po kariuomenės ratais” ir priklausė nuo administratorių gailestingumo, kad išgyventų.

 

Okupantai įliejo „fenomeninius" išteklius ir 10 tonų DDT, kad sėkmingai sustabdytų šiltinės protrūkį, tačiau jie „niekada tinkamai nesuprato ir niekada nesusidorojo su" civilių būsto krizės prievarta ir priklausė nuo jų „stebuklingų medžiagų“, penicilino, ne tam, kad atkurti visuomenės moralę, o kad sumažinti dėl venerinių ligų nedarbingų karių skaičių.

 

 AMG buvo reaktyvi ir silpna, bet mums sakoma, kad „blogiausias problemas“ sukėlė kariai. Šviežiai iš fronto ir grįžusios susidūrusios su mirtimi ir subjaurojimais, sąjungininkų kariuomenės lepino savo karius karštais dušais, karštu maistu ir šokių grupėmis rekvizuotuose viešbučiuose. Kareiviai, trumpai atostogaujantys nuo sunkių kovų, kurios, kaip jie žinojo, gali juos nužudyti arba suluošinti, norėjo prisigerti ir pasimylėti, kol galėjo. Sąjungininkų karinė policija nesugebėjo sutrukdyti pėstininkams įsiveržti į tamsų viduramžių gatvių labirintą, žinomą kaip Ispanijos kvartalas. Kareiviai Neapolį pavertė didžiuliu viešnamiu. Dauguma jų nusikalstamumo liko nenubausta.

 

 M. Lowe'as teigia, kad „miesto, regiono ir, tiesą sakant, visos šalies istorija galėjo būti labai skirtinga“, jeigu Neapolio žmonės „šiuo metu būtų palikti tvarkyti savo reikalus“. Išsamūs jo kaltinimo įrodymai rodo ką kita. Neapolis visada garsėjo skurdu, nusikalstamumu, prostitucija ir pilietine disfunkcija. Šios istorinės tendencijos siautė, vokiečiams pasitraukus. Sąjungininkai pirmenybę teikė kovai su Vokietija, o ne Italijos taisymu, todėl jų reakcijos greitis priklausė nuo civilinių problemų karinių padarinių.

 

Rezultatas, kaip rodo gerai ištirtas ir, dažnai nerimą keliantis, P. Lowe'o pasakojimas, buvo toks, kad stiprieji darė, kaip norėjo, o silpnieji kentėjo, nes nebuvo reikalingi.

 ---

 Ponas Greenas yra žurnalo bendradarbis ir Karališkosios istorijos draugijos narys.“ [1] 

 

1.    REVIEW --- Books: The Cost of Conquering. Green, Dominic.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 12 Apr 2025: C9. 

Did you prepare the water reserve for the war that your rulers are trying to ignite? You are an idiot. Your water is pitiful. The cost of being conquered

"Naples 1944

By Keith Lowe

St. Martin's, 464 pages, $35

When British and American troops entered Naples on Oct. 1, 1943, they became the new rulers of hundreds of thousands of half-starved civilians and a broken city. Before withdrawing, the German occupiers had conducted a punctilious three-week campaign of sabotage and theft. They looted all the food and fuel. They blew up the city's gas, water and sewage piping. They destroyed its port facilities and much of the adjoining neighborhood and scuttled more than 300 ships in the harbor. They destroyed 75% of the major bridges, stole nearly 90% of the city's trucks, buses and trams, demolished railroad tracks and tunnels, and left mines and booby traps everywhere.

Naples fell into anarchy. The police, fire, ambulance, mail, telegraph and telephone services stopped working. The banks, schools and courts were closed. The Allies came to wage war but became responsible for ruling a defeated people and rebuilding the rubble. Already Italy's most-bombed city, Naples suffered further torments in what was supposed to be its first six months of freedom: an economic crisis, mass starvation, a typhus outbreak, a wave of murder, theft and Mafia activity -- a moral collapse in which husbands prostituted their wives and mothers prostituted their daughters to Allied soldiers, and then, in March 1944, the eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius.

The war's apocalyptic aftermath at Naples produced three striking works of literature. "Naples '44" (1978), by the British intelligence officer and travel writer Norman Lewis, was an impressionistic report of a society collapsing as it was conquered. "The Gallery," a 1947 novel by the ex-U.S. intelligence officer John Horne Burns, described the tedium, fear and casual depravities of an army at rest in a city where civilization "was already dead." "The Skin," a 1949 novel by the Fascist-turned-Communist writer Curzio Malaparte, was a nightmare of the Allied occupation, in which degradation flourishes amid "the frightful stench that emanated from the countless hundreds of corpses buried beneath the ruins."

Keith Lowe's "Naples 1944" is the first comprehensive English-language history of life in Naples under the German and Allied occupations. Mr. Lowe, whose previous books include studies of the immediate and long-term effects of World War II in Europe, uses Allied military records and Italian accounts to show how Allied victory in the field led to an ethical defeat rooted in failures of imagination and, this being modern warfare, logistics.

Naples became the first city where the Allies discovered that they were conquerors. A preconquest primer for the Stars and Stripes newspaper, written by a sergeant who had never seen Naples, introduced it as "one of the original 'pleasure cities' of Europe," where the people "go fishing and sailing and drink their vino." The article's title inverted Goethe's advice to the tourist ("See Naples and die") into the soldier's priority: "See Naples and Live." The real Naples was historically poor, crowded and violent. It was more than usually unmanageable after the collapse of the Fascist government in July 1943, the arrival of a German garrison in September and an anti-German uprising at the end of that month, an overlooked episode that Mr. Lowe brings to vivid life.

In the first of many missteps, Mark Clark, the "notoriously vain" and inexperienced American commander, stage-managed his entry parade at Piazza Garibaldi in the east of the city, only to find, he later wrote, the streets "practically empty of civilians." The crowds were massing on the other side of the city, where Naples usually received its conquerors.

Clark planned to make Naples's port the supply hub for the Italian campaign and the city a resort for troops on their way to and from the front line. His ingenious engineers took only days to set up distribution stations and temporary piping for drinking water. Rather than tow away the wrecks, they got the port working by building walkways on top of them. Within a month of liberation, 80% of Naples's sewers were fixed. The port was "handling more tonnage than New York," a "brilliant example," Mr. Lowe writes, "of what could be achieved through Anglo-American cooperation." But the civilian administrators of the Allied Military Government (AMG) were "unprepared . . . under-staffed, under-financed and under-equipped." According to one AMG officer, its men were "well-meaning mediocrities with no political experience, no clear plan and no proper direction." Most of them did not arrive in Naples until December. Many of them lost their typewriters on the way.

Bombed by the Allies, then brutalized by the Germans, the Neapolitans now found themselves "caught beneath the wheels of the military juggernaut" and dependent on the mercy of the administrators who came in its wake for survival. The occupiers poured "phenomenal" resources and 10 tons of DDT into successfully heading off a typhus outbreak, but they "never properly understood, and never got to grips with" the civilian housing crisis that had contributed to the epidemic. The exponential increase in prostitution forced the Allies to deploy the second of their "miracle substances," penicillin, not to restore public morality but to reduce the number of soldiers incapacitated by venereal disease.

The AMG was reactive and weak, but the "worst problems," we are told, were caused by the soldiers. Fresh from the front and facing death and disfigurement on their return, the Allied armies pampered their soldiers with hot showers, hot food and dance bands in the requisitioned hotels. The soldiers, on a short furlough from hard fighting that they knew was likely to kill or maim them, wanted to get drunk and have sex while they could. Allied military police were unable to keep the infantry from invading the dark labyrinth of medieval backstreets known as the Spanish Quarter. The soldiers turned Naples into a vast brothel. Most of their criminality went unpunished.

Mr. Lowe argues that "the history of the city, the region, and indeed the whole country might have been very different" had the people of Naples "been left at this point to organize their own affairs." The detailed evidence of his indictment suggests otherwise. Naples was always notorious for poverty, crime, prostitution and civic dysfunction. These historic tendencies ran amok when the Germans left. The Allies prioritized fighting Germany over fixing Italy, so the speed of their response depended upon the military implications of civilian problems. The result, as Mr. Lowe's well-researched and often disturbing account shows, was that the strong did as they wanted and the weak suffered because they were not needed.

---

Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society." [1]

1.    REVIEW --- Books: The Cost of Conquering. Green, Dominic.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 12 Apr 2025: C9. 

 

 

Domestic spying confers unjustifiable and socially dangerous political and economic privileges on those who access that information, and should be banned. Whistleblower who exposed domestic spying --- AT&T technician went public about US domestic surveillance years before Edward Snowden, but to his dismay, his own revelations never gained traction

 

"In October 2003, the AT&T technician Mark Klein was transferred to a small office on San Francisco's Folsom Street. He was tasked with maintaining the seventh-floor "internet room," where fiber-optic cables carried billions of bits of data across the company's network every second.

Klein and his office mates were all aware of the mysterious room recently constructed directly below them on the sixth floor by people from the National Security Agency -- Room 641A. But they weren't given an inkling of its purpose. Only one or two AT&T employees with NSA clearance could enter. Everyone else called it "the secret room."

Over time, Klein saw company documents and schematics that appeared to reveal that a piece of equipment installed in his internet room, known as a splitter, was making a copy of all the traffic passing through those cables and funneling it downstairs to the secret room. The entire data stream was being duplicated and diverted, Klein wrote in a 2009 memoir: "email browsing, voice-over-internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it . . . the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together."

Klein also gathered evidence indicating that traffic from more than a dozen other internet providers, whose networks were in communication with AT&T's, was also potentially being copied; that AT&T appeared to have set up similar secret rooms in many other U.S. cities; and that his office's secret room housed a processor capable of analyzing the traffic coming from the splitter -- peering inside that intercepted data, not just blindly copying it in bulk.

Klein, who died March 8 in Oakland, Calif., from pancreatic cancer at age 79, told "Frontline": "It dawned on me all at once, and I fell out of my chair." Knowing the NSA wasn't lawfully permitted to conduct surveillance domestically, only abroad, Klein concluded he was unwittingly sitting in the middle of, as he put it, "a massive, unconstitutional, illegal operation."

Eventually, he shared what he knew, leading to lawsuits against the NSA but little practical effect. The breadth of the agency's mass surveillance programs post-9/11 would be revealed more explosively several years later by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Interviewed afterward by the public affairs show "Democracy Now," Klein said, "Of course I feel very vindicated."

Initially, Klein said nothing. "I was too scared," he told "Democracy Now," "and I didn't know if I could find anyone to believe me." Moreover, he couldn't afford to lose his job. Even after retiring at age 59 in 2004, Klein remained wary of possible government retaliation. He'd taken the documents home with him but debated throwing them out.

In December 2005, the New York Times reported that after 9/11, President George W. Bush had secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants to combat terrorism. The paper wrote that the agency had "monitored the international telephone calls and international email messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people" within the U.S.

Klein figured that he was sitting on many of the details and that the scale and scope were far greater than reported. He resolved to go public. Soon he knocked on the door of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights nonprofit in San Francisco, and asked, "Do you folks care about privacy?"

Using Klein's information, the EFF filed a class-action lawsuit, Hepting v. AT&T, setting off a long, overlapping set of legal battles with Klein at their center. The materials he gave EFF were put under seal, but they were company documents, not classified government documents. Unlike Snowden, Klein never had a government security clearance so he couldn't be prosecuted for violating one.

The government asked for the case to be dismissed on the grounds that Klein's leak could expose state secrets. A federal judge ruled against that argument. But in 2008, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act, changing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to legalize surveillance programs like the one Klein was exposing and retroactively immunize companies like AT&T for their cooperation. The law, which Klein lobbied against, killed EFF's lawsuit.

In television interviews at the time, Klein came across as a mild-mannered retired engineer, with wire-rim glasses, a tidy white mustache and a slightly clipped way of pronouncing "internet" that revealed a vestige of a Brooklyn accent.

"I didn't think of him as particularly radical," said Cindy Cohn, then an EFF attorney on the case and now EFF's executive director. "He was somebody who had paid really close attention in civics class and was really committed to the values of this country." But after the legal failure, she said, "He was really, really bitter and angry that nobody listened to him."

A subsequent suit against the NSA was thrown out in 2019; a federal judge ruled then that Klein "can only speculate about what data were actually processed and by whom in the secure room and how and for what purpose, as he was never involved in its operation." The judge accepted the government's argument that continuing with the suit posed "a grave risk to the national security." In 2022, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.

Klein was born on May 2, 1945, in Brooklyn. He was married to Linda Thurston for 40 years before Thurston's sudden death in 2023. "Mark never got over her death," said Martha Robertson, a longtime friend.

In 1962, Klein entered Cornell University to study engineering. But as the U.S. sent troops to Vietnam, he became deeply interested in America's role as an imperial power and switched to history. "He got pretty politicized," said his older brother, Larry Klein, but "he didn't wear his politics on his sleeve. He was very reserved, a serious student."

Klein marched against the war and traveled to the South to register Black voters and support a group founded by Black World War II veterans that promoted armed self-defense against the KKK.

He found his first corporate job, in-house computer repair technician for Singer Corp., demeaning. "He had to carry a beeper with him so that, even on Saturday and Sundays when he wasn't at work, he'd have to leave to fix the goddamn computer," Larry Klein remembered. Robertson recalled that after joining AT&T in 1981, Klein grew discouraged by a "decimation of the workforce and the decimation of the unions."

In his memoir, "Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine . . . and Fighting It," Klein wrote that he and a couple of colleagues had only narrowly avoided being laid off before landing at Folsom Street. The company, he wrote, "preferred to throw us out with the old equipment." He seemed to adopt a similarly negative view of government, amplified by his NSA discovery.

Surveillance is "a sign of a government that's detached," he told Media Roots Radio in 2015. "It's not a people's government. It's a government of the ruling class: a small minority of rich and super rich. And as long as that's the case, they'll continue to spy on everybody." Asked if he had any faith that the American government would ever hold itself to its constitutional ideals, he replied: "None, zero, nada."" [1]

1.  REVIEW --- Obituaries: A Whistleblower Who Revealed Domestic Spying --- The AT&T technician went public about U.S. surveillance several years before Edward Snowden, but to his frustration, his own disclosures never gained traction. Mooallem, Jon.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 12 Apr 2025: C6.