For those digging on MARINA ABROMOVICH
She was profiled on last night's “Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” on PBS. This will be rebroadcast tonight in cities with two PBS stations, or can be viewed for free on PBS.org. Link is www.pbs.org/video/the-eye-of-the-beholder-vab5rt/ .
I will tell you, surprisingly, after watching this program for several years, Gates has almost always (until lately) been fair, open, and unexpectedly neutral in his discussions about these geneaologies. I've seen him give many African Americans news that their ancestors weren't exactly all slaves, many quite successful. He has dropped a lot of educational truth bombs that disrupt the approved narrative keeping black and white divided. THIS SEASON HAS BEEN DIFFERENT. He's profiled more controversial, less appealing figures (Michael Moore, Sarah Silverman), and has steered positive conversations into negative territory. So, it's clear to me that he's now towing the deep state line, being used to define stories of people who might end up in trouble in a fairly sympathetic way. This episode he didn't do the DNA he always does—maybe they threw this one together last minute to get that sympathy rolling on. (Also profiled in this episode is Kehinde Wiley, who painted that awful portrait of Obama in the chair and vines. His family were all war heroes, and there was much speculation about how his ancestors probably felt afraid of lynching, even though the research didn't show any of the ancestors encountering any such ill fate. Wiley emoted that even now he's afraid to drive out to the country because of that different demographic that he assumes is going to be hostile to him. This negative emotional speculation is ridiculously different from past seasons.)
So, here's what was said about and by Marina Abramovich:
Her family was very, very dysfunctional, so no wonder she's like she is. But her family are all heroes and stuff.
Abramovich is “very much the product of her upbringing, but she had a radically different kind of upbringing.” Born in communist Yugoslavia, her parents were national heroes who met on the battlefield. They couldn't get along, and there was violence in the household. Her mother would get in physical fights with the father and go into Marina's room and hold Marina up to protect herself. So Abramovich “took solace in art”. They described her performance art where she let people hurt her. “My work is really emotional”, “something you can really experience”, “I had to explore all the way”.
Her parents' military “heroism molded her childhood”, allowing them to have good jobs and a nicer home. They were “warriors”. She likes warriors and is descended from a lot of “warriors”. She is “rebellious”.
Her paternal grandfather was from Montenegro and fought in WWI, then in 1941 he became a Montenegran partisan fighting the Nazis. Gates produced a document he got from the CIA (imagine that!) from 1953. It specifically talks about the grandfather being one of the first partisans in Montenegro to fight.
They also found “another warrior”. “…a Serbian ethnologist had traced her family to a mythic figure in Balkan history, a (heroic) knight “ who had been immortalized in that area since the 1300s.
Her mother was“crazy, sad, cold, controlling”. Mother's father and uncle were murdered (unsolved). The uncle was the head of the Serbian Orthodox church, known throughout Europe, & his death made intl. News. Abramovich said she heard the king's doctor put crushed diamonds in his food and he died a terrible death. Gates said it was probably just poison, but the man was controversial, the head of the church, embroiled in sexual scandal, and a Nazi sympathizer, so he was assasinated, along with Marina's grandfather, devastating her mother, who became crazy.
“This explains so many things that I could never explain about my character; and why I'm so different;…why I am rebellious; why I take risks. Why I have the feeling of heroism that I need and courage…because it looks like I've got 700 years behind me…and that's a lot to carry.”
Sympathy for the devil……..