The War of Yom Kippur, also known as October War, Ramadan War or Arab-Israeli War of 1973, was an armed conflict, that took place from October 6 to 25, 1973, between Israel and a coalition of Arab states, led by Egypt and Syria, undertook to force Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, intended to be taken with a great military offensive. More explicitly, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, territories conquered by Israel six years earlier, in 1967, during the Six-Day War. 
 
Making plans for a brutal and insidious attack on two fronts, with the main objective being the total suppression of the Israeli armed forces, October 1973 started with the progress of the Egyptian army, conducting a large offensive through the Suez Canal; meanwhile, the Syrian army was entering and concomitantly executing relevant military and territorial attacks into the Golan Heights. So, the Arab states, supported by allied countries like Kuwait, Iraq, Tunisia, Jordan, Algeria and Saudi Arabia, amongst other nations, prematurely oversaw a factual tactic and politic victory, erroneously believing Israel wouldn’t have the capacity to repel such an intense military attack, made of such a strong coalition of enemies. 

Caught by surprise, the Arab world was shocked when Israel, initially looking seemingly lost, defenseless, strategically paralyzed, and equally surprised by an attack on two fronts, started to aggressively and efficiently repel its enemies, forcing the Syrian army to retreat vertiginously, effectively losing all the territories they had occupied in Israeli soil. Starting a process of counteroffensives to the Syrian attack, Israel rapidly turned the game on its favor, through a succession of rapid and very well organized furious attacks, executed with intelligent expertise, instantaneously abandoning the role of victims, to become the aggressors of the war. As soon as they initiated the attack against the Syrian army, the Israeli offensive proved so efficient that their enemies, incapable of stopping the brutal and tempestuous Israeli attacks, that soon revealed itself to be a visceral and powerful machine of war, fast and surprising, cornered the enemy in its own territory. In a few days, having succeeded in making the Syrian army withdrawn several kilometers, the Israelis, in a great turn of events, became the invaders, when they entered into Syrian territory, and started their belligerent offensives in the Syrian capital, Damascus.   
 
The same was done when the Israeli army started to retaliate against the Egyptian army, inflicting with the same level of efficiency and military power a massive and brutal offensive, that forced the enemy to appeal to emergency strategies, in an attempt to repel the Israeli offensive; nonetheless, in a matter of days, with brigades and counteroffensive divisions, the Israeli army had conquered strategic locations in the Sinai Peninsula, forcing the Egyptian army to rethink and reevaluate its military strategies. Worried about the vulnerability of the Syrians, the subsequent attempts in offering to the allies an effective logistic support equally weakened Egypt in such a way that, in a matter of days, the country began to experience the consequences of the Israeli offensive, that for so long had been underestimated.

Thinking how to avenge themselves for the imminent defeat, Egypt and Syria committed horrendous atrocities against Israeli prisoners. The level of brutality inflicted by the two countries was extensively documented. Nevertheless, this unexpectedly short war – having lasted only nineteen days – with an uncertain number of casualties – the speculations are numbered between 8.000 and 18.500 –, the war came to an end with the intervention of the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Nations, and had as a final resolution the restitution of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.
 
With a war on two fronts, the Israeli intelligence has proved itself to be capable of evaluating potentially harmful situations with rapid efficiency, acting under an enormous amount of pressure with tactical effectiveness, besides executing offensive and counteroffensive military operations with inflexible fastness, generating concrete results in improbable circumstances, and achieving everything with an inferior number of soldiers, compared to their enemies, something that caught by surprise everyone who despised the Israeli armed forces. 
 
The result of the Yom Kippur War, and the subsequent Israeli victory, allowed the state of Israel to be recognized, definitively, as an emerging power in the Middle East. Given the fact that Israel was logistically supported by the United States, although this was a relevant factor, without a doubt has not diminished the merits of the victory, specially taking into consideration the fact that the Soviet Union equally helped the Arab States in their offensive against Israel, something which was close to led the United States and the Soviet Union into a direct conflict.
 
The truth being said, having battled so many wars during the course of its relatively recent existence, the state of Israel, that always had a lot of enemies since its foundation, in 1948, has shown the world that they wouldn’t have survived, if they hadn’t a trained and prepared army, fully equipped and constantly in alert, ready to repel the constant aggressions of which they had always been subjected, in all of the troubled and difficult moments of its turbulent history.    



​Wagner

The Battle of Teutoburg Forest was a battle that, by our current Gregorian calendar, occurred in the year 9, between a coalition of Germanic tribes, united to overcome an invasion by the Roman Empire, which is unanimously considered today by scholars and historians alike as the greatest failure in roman military history. 

Everything had started when Arminius, leader of the Germanic tribe of the Cherusci, became a confident and military consultant for Publius Quinctilius Varus, a notorious roman general, of noble origin. Arminius, although a Germanic man by birth, had roman citizenship, and his time in Rome had made him an expert on roman military techniques. Nonetheless, with knowledge about the cruelty and oppression by which his fellow Germanic countrymen were treated at the hands of their roman conquerors, in the shadows, Arminius had devised a plan, conceived with the intent to turn the normally dispersed and disorganized Germanic tribes, that usually fought against each other, into a vigorous and united national army, able to instigate a rebellion against the tyrannical roman rule. A very risky, but audacious plan. Following his instincts, Arminius ignited a conspiracy, that not only would bring about drastic consequences over the history of roman territorial expansion, but would also generate a primordial effect towards the destiny of all Germanic tribes of Europe. 

Attracting Varus with false rumors concerning a local rebellion, the roman general, seeing Arminius as nothing more than a mere footman, without having the slightest notion of what he was really capable of doing it, decided to head to Germania, without expecting what he would eventually find: a brutal, massive and virulent epic revolution of a national scale. Regrouping with three legions, auxiliary troops and cavalrymen, Varus went to the region to suffocate the rebellion, without any notion about the dramatic turn of events that the battle would have in reserve for the roman side.

The then new Roman Empire – a nation going through a slow and lingering period of transition, as some decades ago still was an oligarchic republic, that now, through Octavian, its first emperor, was becoming an autocratic empire – was known to brutalize and oppress the tribes and peoples they had conquered. But the Germanic tribes, united by a common cause, were willing to show that they would not give up without fighting first. So a fastidious and violent conflict inevitably began.

With a well-designed plan, Arminius made the closed, hostile and difficult terrain of the forest to work at his favor, to surprise the romans in a tempestuous attack, from which they had no escape, as the inaccessible geographical conditions of the territory would be insurmountable to the romans, not familiar with the location, filled with hills, dense valleys and dark woods. In fact, what the romans didn’t known, but soon came to find out, is that they were all being attracted to an insidious, but very elaborate trap, since the dense forest would reveal itself to be a conspicuous labyrinth – very easy to get in, but practically impossible to get out. Invariably, as Arminius had intended, the rugged and unpredictable region was, by its own merits, a persistent and dark obstacle for the invaders, and falling into one trap after another, the romans were surprised as never before – and even after – in all of their history, subjected and humiliated by a perfect combination of planning, brutality and local geography, being invariably crushed and massacred without piety. Several roman officials, between them Varus, when realized the flagrant impossibility of an escape, committed suicide. While the Germanic losses were maintained to a minimum, the number of fatalities in the roman side is estimated to be between fifteen and twenty thousand soldiers. A direct consequence of the roman defeat was the almost immediate retreat of the roman presence in the region, that controlled fortifications, camps and even cities in the vicinities. Nonetheless, the practical effects of such defeat were dramatic and decisive to Rome. From this day on, the expansion of the Roman Empire would occur mainly in the east and west, but they would never try again to conquer territories in Central Europe. The territory known to them as Germania – which roughly corresponds today to current Germany, besides some parts of neighboring countries, like France and Switzerland – would never be harassed or invaded by the romans again. In a brutal, severe and violent way, the arrogant and sumptuous Roman Empire was forced to recognize that, although they were a great military and economic power, they would never be able to hold absolute control over everything. A hard lesson, that certainly had shown to the “superior” roman civilization that could be very costly to them trying to subject, overdo and depreciate the “inferior” barbarian world.        

  

No soldiers in the sun shall perish
Before evening outdoors
Time feels digesting emptiness
In your eyes, always reflected in mine

Those days shall fall
So suffering could be made of an endless endurance 
And all your vain goals will persist
Infatuated by nothing personal

A suffering child dies
No soldiers in the sun shall perish
Feeling what could be
A sickness caused by your interior wars

Lyrics: Wagner Hertzog

The silence seems tired of so cold winters
Untouched souls live by fear of belief
Master of war, arrogance 
And sordid disillusionment
Prey on such a low atmosphere

Fallen grounds bound by chance
And violent urges for love one another
Fallen sounds astounded by a shadows dance
Portrays a father that no son shall bother

Castles made of air, wind and sound
Very soon will be the prison 
that fantasizes benevolence
Under a red sea made of rotten 
Bodies plagued by constant turmoil

Lyrics: Wagner Hertzog
 

Life's not a hell. It's nothing more than a funfair, where the attractions get more expensive every time you visit. One day it's family day. That day, of course, is great fun. Everything seems exciting, cheap, lovely and pretty until you get home noticing that you've spent much more than you'd had in mind. At that point, you could go berserk and feel the urge to massacre your family with the old rusty axe of your demented father, for example. That thought can make you feel rather nauseous, or at least, it made me feel that way.

It was two o'clock at night when I sat straight up in bed. My wife asked me whether there was something wrong. "No, my dear," I answered by force of habit, "I just can't sleep." Equally according to habit, I kissed her on her forehead and got out of the bed, down the stairs, into the living room. The house wasn't too big, but big enough for me, my wife and our two children. I could have said that we were happy together. 

I also could stop lying. 

I sat down on the easy-chair and grabbed the remote control. There was nothing on TV so I decided to play a movie. 

I'm part of an in-between generation. The generation before me has done the best they could to mess everything up, and those after me found some extra things to mess up. My generation had and has an opinion on that, but is too lazy to do anything about it. The generation before me destroyed nature to construct big buildings, through which the generation after me flies planes. Mine films the disaster and sells those images to CNN for big money. I cannot do anything about it and that's what we're all thinking.

I poured myself a gin. The video tape was one of the tiny pleasures my wife allowed me, but this time it didn't arouse me. I'm afraid I've gambled away all my feelings at the funfair. Looking through the living room, I imagined ways to have some fun with the fireplace poker. I still didn't feel sleepy. It seemed like I had been sleeping for years, maybe even decades, and now I wanted to catch up all that lost time. No, I just had to catch up that time. Second glass of gin. Restless.

Suddenly a brilliant idea formed in my head. "I'm going fishing." I gathered my line, bait and hooks. That, I thought, should be able to calm me down. Fishing always calms me down, regardless of the hour of the day or night and regardless of the situation I'm in. I put on my jacket and climbed the stairs, back to the bedroom. I gently woke up my wife, said that I was going to fish and with a swift jerk I cut her neck with the fishing line. Apparently the heart keeps beating for a while, because I saw that the blood intermittently kept on flowing out of the slashed neck of my beloved one, over our white sheets and onto the floor. 

Then I went to the bedroom of my four-year-old son. I decided not to wake him up, and cut his little neck with a fluent, almost surgical movement. He can't have noticed a thing. 

I felt great. I was going to make hit the headlines. All the papers would state "family tragedy" on the first page and a psychological profile of the murderer in an extra edition. No, this was not another family tragedy, this was a new attraction at the funfair we call "life". This was a 3-D haunted house and it was so lifelike it could kill you. 

I got out of my son's room and went to my daughter's. There, I suddenly stood still, numbed. The door was open and I saw my little girl sleeping. She had always been my favourite child, even if I wasn't allowed to say such a thing. We had been playing games for countless hours. Games we both visibly, and sometimes secretly, enjoyed. She was only six years old but had a clearer vision on life than the people who I called my friends. 


"Daddy, are we going to the playground?" 

Her eyes twinkled in the dark and I couldn't refuse her anything - ever. I lifted my princess out of her bed and said that mommy was ill, but the two of us would indeed go to the playground. I helped her get dressed and together we descended the stairs to leave the house. Forever. 

After driving about a hundred meters, little Sarah had fallen asleep again. It was four o'clock, not a good time to drive around with a young child. We couldn't go to the nearest playground of course. In former times, you could always go there, but the park had gotten occupied by drug addicts and dealers at night. I drove by the park, possibly knocking down a homeless girl but kept on driving. Hundred kilometers, two hundred maybe. In the end, hours later we arrived at a playground in a suburb.

Sarah had been sleeping like an angel on the back seat all the time. I stroked her hair to wake her up and said that we were there. We went under the big arch which was overgrown by ivy and found ourselves in the most beautiful playground on earth. At least, for now. A girl was sleeping on a bench. She couldn't have been older than twenty. She was gorgeous, enchanting. Her black hair glistened in the faint light of the lanterns. I sat down on a bench opposite of her, and looked at her. My mind made up a world with that young woman that was no longer possible.

Meanwhile, Sarah had run to the castle, where she would grieve in the tower until her prince showed up to rescue her.

 Suddenly, the girl woke up, probably because of a cold wind flow. She startled when she saw me, but I nodded at her comfortingly and gave her my jacket. We started talking. She said that she lived in one of the newly built flats on the allotment nearby. After a fierce quarrel between her father and her, she had run away from home and had hidden on this playground for a while. She kept on talking and I kept on listening. I think it lasted for more than an hour. Only then - to my surprise not a moment earlier - she asked me who I was and what I was doing here. I lied that I was the owner of a funfair attraction and that my daughter wanted to play on the playground. 

Not even having finished that sentence, I got seized by the overwhelming silence that suddenly had appeared in the park. The silence just shivered down my spine. I stood up and ran to the castle. Sarah had disappeared. I couldn't see her anywhere. Suddenly the runaway girl called me. Still wearing my jacket, she was standing next to "the spider". The climbing attraction consisted of a giant pyramid-shaped wickerwork of rope around a huge pole. Sarah had been climbing all the way to the top, and there, she had missed a step. With a broken neck, my princess lay on the floor. Her rescuing prince had failed to show. 

It was family day at the funfair, and I had paid much more than I'd had in mind.


​Tamara Williams

No longer I’m able to feel
But the space is no longer filled
By empty sorrow remains
You cry motionless mountains of sand
You don’t understand the interference
Of your actions in my thoughts

Crying will no longer be
A distinction of the moon
That you keep safe in your eyes
Malevolent shadows never die
Stay tonight with the love I have
To keep you warm, not tired

Please, be the sun that shines
For me, always
Before I die alone 
Consumed by shadows  

​
Lyrics: Wagner Hertzog

No man shall rely solely
In the virtually inexistent path
Of his diminished pains
For goals never to be free

Dead days that never passes
Diminishes his chances for liberty
I can see more days ahead of me but 
only sorrow keeps me wandering properly

The great smile that you keep
And your beautifully splendid eyes
Reflecting the brightness of the sun
Relinquishes life and suddenly dies  
​

Lyrics: Wagner Hertzog

Sweet Home is a 2015 bilingual Spanish horror/ thriller film, directed by Rafa Martínez, and starring Ingrid García Jonsson and Bruno Sevilla. The story follows a couple, imprisoned in an abandoned derelict building, fighting for their lives against a group of brutal criminals, looking to kill them both.

The movie tells the story of a night in the life of Alicia (García Jonsson), a civil inspector, responsible for the state of preservation of home buildings in urban areas. One afternoon, after one routine inspection, she accidentally grabs the keys of an abandoned apartment, and decides to keep it for the weekend, as she sees the location as the perfect place for a surprise party, to celebrate her boyfriend’s birthday. 

After blindfolding her boyfriend Simon (Sevilla), she leads both to the unsuspected location for a romantic night, as a couple, in the abandoned apartment. After a good start, they discuss, and after separating just for a little while, Alicia notices there are more people in the place, which – with the possible exception of one old man who refuses to leave, whose apartment was inspected by her earlier that day – should be empty. 

After being noticed, Alicia is successful in escaping the criminals, but her boyfriend doesn’t have the same luck. After a fight ensues, he manages to escape, just to be caught and stabbed by one of the assailants. When Alicia by chance locates her boyfriend, she manages to help him, and he successfully kills his offender. When both reduce the entire gang to simply one man, they think that escaping alive would be easy, but when reinforcement arrives in the person of one professional sadistic killer, things become really terrifying for the couple, especially when she uncovers the fact that this men were probably all hired by the real state agency, to kill the few remaining residents of the building – mostly aged and solitary people – to demolish the structure, and build a whole new set of luxury and expensive flats. 

The end, painstakingly aggressive and exceedingly surprising, will simply make you jump from the couch. And you will certainly have the desire to see this movie again.   

With great moments from the very beginning to the last final seconds, Sweet Home is a terrific movie, with absolutely no faults at all! Great acting, dramatic moments, agonizing tensions, fearful scenes, afflictive downturns and an amazing soundtrack are all greatly combined, working splendidly altogether, with the final result being this fantastic and superb masterpiece.
The script, decent, cohesive, well-structured, realistic and abrasive, it is beyond convincing: its dark undertones are extremely grounded in real possibilities, with the timing and the correct unrolling of events being a major highlight, completely favorable to the plot, having an almost perfect mathematical set of sequences.   

There are no complaints about this movie. With excellent actors doing their best, an impeccable set of technical proficiency – with special mentions to its refined cinematography and a very lucid photography, responsible for its bright artistic visuals – terrifying scenario, correct timing and pace, everything possible in this movie is beyond compliment; in fact, all compliments in the world still wouldn’t do justice to the professional level of artistic excellence this movie easily achieves.  

With a great history of filmmaking, Spain rarely gives us bad movies. Fortunately for us, this artistic legacy continues to this day. With such a groundbreaking excellence, having executed brightly such a common concept, Sweet Home is a first class movie that certainly deserves one hundred stars, or more, but since I can give to it only five, it is five stars indeed. But it remains being just a few, since it deserves a lot more.   



​Wagner

Agoraphobia is a 2015 supernatural horror movie, written, directed and produced by Lou Simon, starring Cassie Scerbo. In the film, Scerbo plays Faye, an agoraphobic woman, who returns to the house of her childhood, in a desperate measure to overcome her disorder, soon to discover that, apparently, the house is being haunted by a supernatural entity.

Well, unfortunately, from the beginning, the movie is a total disaster. The acting sometimes, becomes so artificial, that the actors in general give the impression to simply spit up their lines, in a much trained sequence, without any emotion or credible tension, just for the sake of obligation. At times, the scenes become so conventionally picturesque and cartoonish, that resembles more a British afternoon soap opera, than an actual horror movie. And soon you pick yourself up just wandering “why the hell in this world am I watching this movie?” Well… do yourself a favor, and don’t!

Although the lead actress deliver a performance that is – at least, for a movie of this category – somewhat decent, the plot doesn’t have nothing in its favor. Very common ground and ordinary, what is really happening, Faye discovers near the end of the movie, is that her husband and her best friend are having an affair, and both are planning to put her in a psychiatric institution, to take full control of her vast inheritance. They somewhat take advantage of her psychiatric condition, to deliberately execute tricks and deceits against her. As a result, she becomes really disturbed, giving to others the impression that she is losing her mind, becoming delusional and insane. As soon as Faye discovers their plan, they decide to kill her. Nonetheless, the house is indeed inhabited by a ghost – of Faye’s deceased mother – that was seeking to reveal to her daughter the dangers she was facing, in the risk of the conspiracy, on which she was the victim. In the end, the spirit of her mother is what saves her life.

Besides the mediocre plot, that is not what the movie has at its worst; things are slow, at times it seems more like a family melodrama, than a real horror movie, and the acting are very unforgivably dull and mechanic. The fact that the entire movie develops completely indoors (of course, she’s agoraphobic) is another major cause of monotony (lacks movement in the structure of the plot). With the possible exception of the performance delivered by Cassie Scerbo, that is quite convincing – and at times, it seems the work of a professional actress [which is quite an achievement, given the below the average performance skills from the rest of the cast] –, the movie is superbly monotonous, and boring beyond imagination. A very low class average low budget B-movie, highly generic, that really doesn’t worth your time.  Nonetheless, I have learned to appreciate the positive points that even this kind of movie has to offer: in this case, a very good photography – in a very classic style, for the genre – and a somewhat intriguing lead character, facing a rather peculiar condition, in a very unusual situation. But the movie doesn’t have anything more to offer, so it is very poor, especially in terms of plot, acting performance, originality and intellectual sophistication. One star and a half does the rating for this movie, quite well.                

​Wagner

Otto Skorzeny was a notorious Nazi Germany Official, Standartenführer of the SS, the infamous paramilitary organization of the Third Reich. After escaping from prison, in 1948, with the help of three former SS colleagues that were wearing American military uniforms, he apparently had become involved with the clandestine movement known as Werwolf – a supposedly secret organization of the Nazi resistance, that fought against American occupation in Post War Germany – and ODESSA, another speculative organization, aimed at facilitating escape routes for former Nazi Officials, towards South America or the Middle East, preventing them from being captured, and tried for war crimes. An Austrian citizen, like Adolf Hitler, born June 12, 1908 in Vienna, Otto Skorzeny took a major role in several battles and missions of high risk, which earned him the nickname "The Most Dangerous Man in Europe", solely on the basis of the high level of determination, efficiency and diligence, on which he realized all the missions he was designated to perform. 

In 1944, he was the leader on Operation Panzerfaust, whose main goal was to prevent Hungary to surrender to the Red Army, which was a personal fear of Adolf Hitler, resentful of the possible consequences of an imminent invasion of the Soviet Union, if they entered Hungary without encountering military resistance. To make those fears fade away, Skorzeny kidnapped the son of Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian national leader, and made him renounce his position. Soon afterwards, a pro-Nazi dictator was installed on his place. The success of the operation earned Skorzeny a promotion to Obersturmbannführer. Tireless on his dynamic and diligent military zeal, Skorzeny soon after commanded the Operation Greif, which consisted on making German soldiers fluent in the English language to wear American military uniforms, to infiltrate themselves amongst the enemy’s troops, in the Ardennes. Nonetheless, this operation was a failure, since most of the soldiers involved were captured, and eventually executed, and the mission was deemed a great military scandal, for its flagrant violations of war conventions. And besides that, the mission failed to achieve its main goal, which was to ensure the integrity of one or more bridges over a river, before it could be destroyed. Having successfully avoided American authorities after the war, Skorzeny flew to Bavaria, going afterwards to France, and then to Spain. In the beginning of the fifties, Skorzeny went to Egypt, where he was reunited with his former colleagues of the SS, Wehrmacht and Gestapo, to assume the training of the Egyptian Army. After this endeavor, as improbable as it seems, Skorzeny worked as a special consultant for the Israeli Mossad, on the condition that Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal excluded him from the list of Wanted Nazi war criminals, something which Wiesenthal remarkably denied. Nonetheless, Skorzeny, on reasons not yet fully understood, was persuaded to collaborate with Mossad anyway. Never abandoning the military career, in the sixties Skorzeny founded the Paladin Group, an agency specialized in guerilla exercise and military consultant services for governments, whose real purpose seemed to be training mercenaries, and offering their services on the parallel market. 

For his fearless attitude, sense of purpose, determination, diligence and efficiency in combat, Otto Skorzeny remains legendary, and one of the best remembered individuals of the Third Reich, that fought a lot of battles, and survived all of them. Since he never was a national socialist, by ideology or association, nothing in his biography suggests Skorzeny to be a Nazi worshipper or believer, as to know, a fanatic flatterer like Rudolph Hess, an unscrupulous careerist like Heinrich Himmler, or an anti-Semitic butcher like Reinhard Heydrich. Just a military commander, always doing in the best way possible the work he was trained to do: combat. Nothing beyond that. Otto Skorzeny died of pulmonary cancer in 1975, in Spain, when he was 67 years old. He remains being one of only a handful of Nazis rehabilitated by history.


​Wagner