This used to be a picture from when my family went to Odessa. The famous Potemkin Stairs to be precise.

I edited out the people from it via some machine learning algorithm because i wanted the end result to look surreal.

When you do not have a full picture and take away the human and the understanding aspects from it, to flatten it, to remove it, to think about ideals without confronting yourself with reality, what you have is a grotesque and distorted dream-like parody of the original. The equations might be cold, but without understanding and so the simulation is distorted and not representative of reality.

Also, all i know is that i do not like war. Because war does not just destroy lives and the work of lives if not generations. It tampers with the human soul itself. It makes people not want to see other people. It makes people want to see easily spottable enemies. To put it simply, it makes us want a clear objective that gives us a reason to kill. And the reasons to kill are never simple. They are simplified. And often they are the result of ... removing humanity. Because humanity is too complex.

Let me rephrase something Frank Herbert said, which was then parroted by George Lucas: "I don't like [war]. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere." It by Frank Herbert about the idolization and the idealization of war and despots, and in his haiku he was comparing war to sand. It then was used by George Lucas as a "nice way to make people understand how Anakin is like the Muad'dib, somebody who will become a warmonger because so it was profetized". It has also been ridiculed and mocked endlessly for its obviousness, bad use and bad portrayal. That is what happens when you use something without understanding it and removing the human aspect from it.

All i have is a distorted picture. A memory of stuff retold. A loss of friendship and friends who are either dead or possibly dying or now see each other on opposite sides of a conflict neither wanted and all seek to point flaws in each other out of revenge.

But let me explain why. And as usual (for me) it takes a while to explain the full picture. Being quick and to the point has never been my strong suit (unfortunately).

The reasons (at the time) for taking this picture were silly. It was a vacation and we were trying to recreate a scene of an italian movie.

A famous quote from a famous italian movie of my youth was a cry from an angry mod saying "Battleship Potemkin is a shitty movie!".

Battleship Potemkin itself was a movie about a crew of a battleship rebelling against its officers, who are tired of being worked for long hours and then forced to be berated for trying to sleep in really messy conditions and for refusing to "eat the borscht" where said dish was being prepared with rotten meat filled with maggots.

The abuses cause a revolution when they are given "by order of the government" to fire onto the people of Odessa. And the revolution starts well, but the charismatic leader (as it often happens) gets killed.

The remaining people of the battleship make peace with the people of Odessa and they share food and they have fun and they seem happy. Then they get frenzied over what the government was trying to do. And when one man, allied with the government, tries to shift blame from the government onto the Jews (it's always the jews that get blamed in old movies) it gets rightfully beaten to a pulp.

In the end... right on this staircase the cossacks arrive and they start with hyper-organized movements to mow down the crowd. In the end, the sailors of the Potemkin Battleship have to fire on the very Odessa they wanted to protect, in order to kill the leaders of the Tsarists.

Then a bunch of Tsarists ship show up... and all seems lost, but suddenly it is revealed that on those ships too the crew is revolting against their tsarists officers.

The italian movie decrying that "Battleship Potemkin is a shitty movie!" was itself an affectionate parody of the movie Battleship Potemkin. It follows the same exact story line except for the ending, but uses office environments and "being denied to see the championship's final matches" as a substitute for real life problems. The inciting incident being the boss thinking he is cultured but he ignores context and story of the movie, forcing everybody to see it to appreciate "the techniques used" rather than the story. And not only that, he only uses that single movie. Every time. For a year straight.

In the end the revolution in the italian movie fails and the people are forced to re-enact the movie they destroyed. Creating an obscene cut up sequence of "key moments" of the "Battleship Potemkin" movie to sate their oppressor, who remained in charge.

It is a movie that is very much the product of its time, when movie critics tried to perpetuate the idea that movies should be analyzed only based on technique or... well... other obscene stuff like that. It is a movie about the obscenities that the work force was... uh... forced to endure. It is a movie about the grotesque ways in which people try to "not think" about the ways in which they are obsessed... until they reach a breaking point.

Human lives cannot be flattened.

Let me give you an example. Carl Marx is often cited as saying that "religion is a drug" as if it were a bad thing to be hated. The full quote says, instead, this: "Religion is the opium of the people. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions." it is not a condemnation of religion. It explains why religion is important.

Another example could be Hitler himself (i mean, we are the internet, everything must be "Reductio ad Hitlerum") who many people today think was a far right person, while instead was a far left person, he """"just"""" equated "the 1% that need to be fought" with "the jews" and pretty much was ridiculed so much for this insane idea... that nobody thought he could get power... and once he got power nobody thought he was petty enough to strike other political leaders and other nations as a revenge for being ridiculed.

But people like quick quotes. They like "flattened human lives" making people feel like they have a human being in the shape of "that which they hate" robs them of the ability to hate them. Which... well... it is only partially true. For example, one of the reasons why i currently hate Putin so much is because i know next to nothing about him, all i see is what i am shown... and what i am shown is ridiculous.

He most assuredly is still a human being but damn if he makes it so easy to be hated and ridiculed.

For all i know his current way of "governing" stems from the same idiocy as that of Hitler. A man who found power even while being ridiculed for his shallowness and lack of sight for a full picture and always wanting to make things simple... and decided that "everybody else must pay", for not adhering to his ideal of "bright and simple ideas".

All i know is that when you do not have a full picture and take away the human aspect from it... what you have is a grotesque and distorted dream-like parody of the original.

So... we:
• Start with a real event, a revolution.
• We than have a tragic movie, fable-like in its simplicity and direct message, about a rebellion that ends "well" against all hope even with the massive casualties, and where the enemies are portrayed as machine-like parodies of humanity.
• We have then another layer of an italian parody movie that shows a petty revolution started for petty reasons and how that fails and everybody is forced to recreate the original movie without anybody understanding it, either because they refuse to acknowledge a movie that simplifies humanity and is also outside their area of expertise... or because they think what was important in the movie was what was devoid of humanity, the techniques used to film it.
• The next layer we have is my family, laughing while recreating "the baby scene", once again distorting the message even more.

I deleted my family and all the people present on these potemkin stairs in Odessa to visualize how these stairs are (in my memory) forever distorted. They are "a thing that exists". They are a thing that my family visited. There were people there which i never knew properly.

Maybe i even met some of the artists i commissioned in Ukraine without knowing them. Maybe they were kids, so even if i knew they would become nice artists i would have only a distorted memory.

Maybe i ... well ... there are many "maybe"s.

All i know is that human lives, not parodies of it, are dying. From both sides. And the one man who gave the command to do it was a man who really looks like the kind of man who likes to flatten other human beings into parodies of themselves, so he can justify himself. And since he likes that a lot he wants other people to be just as informed as he is. Telling other people to "flatten" the enemy in their minds before "flattening" their cities with bombs.

I am powerless to stop the conflict because i am just a disabled person from italy. All i can do is write a plea to my representatives.

Bartolo, Benifei, Bonafè, Chinnici, Cazzolino, De Castro, Ferrandino, Gualmini, Laureti, Majorino, Moretti, Picierno, Roberti, Smeriglio, Tinagli, Toia.

16 people out of 76.

The rest are Berlusconi and his allies... or Movimento 5 Stelle. All of them part of an ideology to "make things simple" which... is exactly what caused the problem in the first place. I wrote almost 3 weeks ago, but i have my concerns.

Now i see artists in Russia suffering because of "let's make this simple". Some people tell me that Putin and is allies are suffering as well... their economical analysis makes me think they are not suffering very much from this. And the blocks on russia are affecting our economy as well, from the lack of fertilizars to the lack of replacement parts for machines.

This is what happens when somebody in power thinks they can make stuff simple.

When you do not have a full picture and take away the human and the understanding aspects from it, to flatten it, to remove it, to think about ideals without confronting yourself with reality, what you have is a grotesque and distorted dream-like parody of the original. The equations might be cold, but without understanding and so the simulation is distorted and not representative of reality.

Also, all i know is that i do not like war. Because war does not just destroy lives and the work of lives if not generations. It tampers with the human soul itself. It makes people not want to see other people. It makes people want to see easily spottable enemies. To put it simply, it makes us want a clear objective that gives us a reason to kill. And the reasons to kill are never simple. They are simplified. And often they are the result of ... removing humanity. Because humanity is too complex.

Let me rephrase something Frank Herbert said, which was then parroted by George Lucas: "I don't like [war]. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere." It by Frank Herbert about the idolization and the idealization of war and despots, and in his haiku he was comparing war to sand. It then was used by George Lucas as a "nice way to make people understand how Anakin is like the Muad'dib, somebody who will become a warmonger because so it was profetized". It has also been ridiculed and mocked endlessly for its obviousness, bad use and bad portrayal. That is what happens when you use something without understanding it and removing the human aspect from it.

All i have is a distorted picture. A memory of stuff retold. A loss of friendship and friends who are either dead or possibly dying or now see each other on opposite sides of a conflict neither wanted and all seek to point flaws in each other out of revenge.

This used to be a picture from when my family went to Odessa. The famous Potemkin Stairs to be precise.

I edited out the people from it via some machine learning algorithm because i wanted the end result to look surreal.