title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: After three years in the dungeons of the fortress, he spent another four years in the castle of Shlisselburg. Due to his diet, he suffered from scurvy and all his teeth fell out. Later, he recounted that he found relief in mentally re-enacting the legend of Prometheus. His continuing imprisonment in these awful conditions led him to entreat his brother to supply him with poison.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Following the death of Nicholas I, the new Tsar Alexander II personally struck Bakunin's name off the amnesty list. In February 1857, his mother's pleas to the Tsar were finally heeded and he was allowed to go into permanent exile in the western Siberian city of Tomsk. Within a year of arriving in Tomsk, Bakunin married Antonina Kwiatkowska, the daughter of a Polish merchant. He had been teaching her French. In August 1858, Bakunin was visited by his second cousin, General Count Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, who had been governor of Eastern Siberia for ten years.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Muravyov was a liberal and Bakunin, as his relative, became a particular favourite. In the spring of 1859 Muravyov helped Bakunin with a job for Amur Development Agency which allowed him to move with his wife to Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia. This brought Bakunin to the circle of political discussion at Muravyov's colonial headquarters. Saint Petersburg's treatment of the colony, including the dumping of malcontents there, fostered resentment. This inspired a proposal for a "United States of Siberia", independent of Russia and federated into a new "United States of Siberia and America", following the example of the United States of America. The circle included Muravyov's young Chief of Staff Kukel, who Peter Kropotkin related had the complete works of Alexander Herzen; the civil governor Izvolsky, who allowed Bakunin to use his address for correspondence; and Muravyov's deputy and eventual successor, General Alexander Dondukov-Korsakov.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: When Herzen criticised Muravyov in "The Bell", Bakunin wrote vigorously in his patron's defence. Bakunin tired of his job as a commercial traveller, but thanks to Muravyov's influence, was able to keep his sinecure (worth 2,000 roubles a year) without having to perform any duties. Muravyov was forced to retire from his post as governor general, partly because of his liberal views and partly due to fears he might take Siberia towards independence. He was replaced by Korsakov, who perhaps was even more sympathetic to the plight of the Siberian exiles. Korsakov was also related to Bakunin, Bakunin's brother Paul having married his cousin. Taking Bakunin's word, Korsakov gave him a written permission to board all ships on the Amur River and its tributaries as long as he was back in Irkutsk when the ice came.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: On 5 June 1861, Bakunin left Irkutsk under cover of company business, ostensibly employed by a Siberian merchant to make a trip to Nikolaevsk. By 17 July, he was aboard the Russian warship "Strelok" bound for Kastri, in Greece. However, in the port of Olga, he persuaded the American captain of the SS "Vickery" to take him aboard. Despite encountering the Russian Consul on board, Bakunin sailed away under the nose of the Russian Imperial Navy. By 6 August, he had reached Hakodate in the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaidō and continued south to Yokohama.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: In Japan, Bakunin, by happenstance, met Wilhelm Heine, a comrade-in-arms from Dresden. He also met the German botanist Philipp Franz von Siebold who had been involved in opening up Japan to Europeans (particularly the Russians and the Dutch) and was a friend of Bakunin's patron Muraviev. Von Siebold's son wrote some 40 years later:


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: With his ideas still developing, Bakunin left Japan from Kanagawa on the SS "Carrington". He was one of 16 passengers, including Heine, Rev. P. F. Koe, and Joseph Heco. Heco was a Japanese American, who eight years later played a significant role giving political advice to Kido Takayoshi and Itō Hirobumi during the revolutionary overthrow of the feudal Tokugawa shogunate. They arrived in San Francisco on 15 October. Bakunin boarded the "Orizaba" for Panama (the quickest route to New York), and after waiting two weeks boarded the "Champion" for New York.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: In Boston, Bakunin visited Karol Forster, a partisan of Ludwik Mieroslawski during the 1848 Revolution in Paris, and caught up with other "Forty-Eighters", veterans of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, such as Friedrich Kapp. He then sailed for Liverpool, arriving on December 27. Bakunin immediately went to London to see Herzen. That evening he burst into the drawing-room where the family was having supper. "What! Are you sitting down eating oysters! Well! Tell me the news. What is happening, and where?!"


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Having re-entered Western Europe, Bakunin immediately immersed himself in the revolutionary movement. In 1860, while still in Irkutsk, Bakunin and his political associates had been greatly impressed by Giuseppe Garibaldi and his expedition to Sicily, during which he declared himself dictator in the name of Victor Emmanuel II. After his return to London, he wrote to Garibaldi on 31 January 1862: "If you could have seen as I did the passionate enthusiasm of the whole town of Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia, at the news of your triumphal march across the possession of the mad king of Naples, you would have said as I did that there is no longer space or frontiers."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin asked Garibaldi to participate in a movement encompassing Italians, Hungarians and South Slavs against both Austria and Turkey. Garibaldi was preparing for the Expedition against Rome. By May, Bakunin's correspondence focused on Italian-Slavic unity and the developments in Poland. By June, he had resolved to move to Italy, but waited for his wife to join him. When he left for Italy in August, Mazzini wrote to Maurizio Quadrio, one of his key supporters, that Bakunin was a good and dependable person. However, with the news of the defeat at Aspromonte, Bakunin paused in Paris where he was briefly involved with Ludwik Mierosławski. However, Bakunin rejected Mieroslawski's chauvinism and refusal to grant any concessions to the peasants.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: In September, Bakunin returned to England and focussed on Polish affairs. When the Polish insurrection broke out in January 1863, he sailed to Copenhagen to join the Polish insurgents. They planned to sail across the Baltic in the SS "Ward Jackson" to join the insurrection. This attempt failed, and Bakunin met his wife in Stockholm before returning to London.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin focused again on going to Italy and his friend Aurelio Saffi wrote him letters of introduction to revolutionaries in Florence, Turin, and Milan. Mazzini wrote him letters of commendation to Federico Campanella in Genoa and Giuseppe Dolfi in Florence. Bakunin left London in November 1863, travelled via Brussels, Paris and Vevey, (Switzerland), and arrived in Italy on 11 January 1864. It was here that he first developed his anarchist ideas. Bakunin planned a secret organization of revolutionaries to carry out propaganda and prepare for direct action. He recruited Italians, Frenchmen, Scandinavians and Slavs into the International Brotherhood, also called the Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: By July 1866, Bakunin was informing Herzen and Ogarev about the fruits of his work over the previous two years. His secret society then had members in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Britain, France, Spain, and Italy, as well as Polish and Russian members. Among his Polish associates was the former insurgent, Walery Mroczkowski, who became a friend and translator into French. In his "Catechism of a Revolutionary" of 1866, he opposed religion and the state, advocating the "absolute rejection of every authority including that which sacrifices freedom for the convenience of the state."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Giuseppe Fanelli met Bakunin at Ischia in 1866. In October 1868, Bakunin sponsored Fanelli to travel to Barcelona to share his libertarian visions and recruit revolutionists to the International Workingmen's Association. Fanelli's trip and the meeting he organised during his travels was the catalyst for the Spanish exiles, the largest workers' and peasants' movement in modern Spain and the largest Anarchist movement in modern Europe. Fanelli's tour took him first to Barcelona, where he met and stayed with Elisée Reclus. Reclus and Fanelli disagreed about Reclus' friendships with Spanish republicans, and Fanelli soon left Barcelona for Madrid. Fanelli stayed in Madrid until the end of January 1869, conducting meetings to introduce Spanish workers, including Anselmo Lorenzo, to the First International. In February 1869 Fanelli left Madrid, journeying home via Barcelona. While in Barcelona again, he met with painter Josep Lluís Pellicer and his cousin, Rafael Farga Pellicer along with others who were to play an important role establishing the International in Barcelona, as well as the Alliance section.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: During the 1867–1868 period, Bakunin responded to Émile Acollas's call and became involved in the French League of Peace and Freedom (LPF), for which he wrote a lengthy essay, "Federalism, Socialism, and Anti-Theologism". Here, he advocated a federalist socialism, drawing on the work of Proudhon. He supported freedom of association and the right of secession for each unit of the federation, but emphasized that this freedom must be joined with socialism, for "[l]iberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality".


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin played a prominent role in the Geneva Conference of the LPF (September 1867), and joined the Central Committee. The founding conference was attended by 6,000 people. As Bakunin rose to speak, "the cry passed from mouth to mouth: 'Bakunin!' Garibaldi, who was in the chair, stood up, advanced a few steps and embraced him. This solemn meeting of two old and tried warriors of the revolution produced an astonishing impression. [...] Everyone rose and there was a prolonged and enthusiastic clapping of hands". At the Berne Congress of the LPF in 1868, Bakunin and other socialists, Élisée Reclus, Aristide Rey, Jaclard, Giuseppe Fanelli, N. Joukovsky, V. Mratchkovsky, and others, found themselves in a minority. They seceded from the LPF, establishing their own International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, which adopted a revolutionary socialist program.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: In 1868, Bakunin joined the Geneva section of the First International, in which he remained very active until he was expelled from the International by Karl Marx and his followers at the Hague Congress in 1872. Bakunin was instrumental in establishing the Italian and Spanish branches of the International.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: In 1869, the Social Democratic Alliance was refused entry to the First International on the grounds that it was an international organisation in itself, and only national organisations were permitted membership in the International. The Alliance dissolved and the various groups which it comprised joined the International separately.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Between 1869 and 1870, Bakunin became involved with the Russian revolutionary Sergey Nechayev in a number of clandestine projects. However, Bakunin publicly broke with Nechaev over what he described as the latter's "Jesuit" methods, by which all means were justified to achieve revolutionary ends, but privately attempted to maintain contact.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: In 1870–1871, Bakunin led a failed uprising in Lyon and Besançon on the principles later exemplified by the Paris Commune, calling for a general uprising in response to the collapse of the French government during the Franco-Prussian War, seeking to transform an imperialist conflict into social revolution. In his "Letters to A Frenchman on the Present Crisis", he argued for a revolutionary alliance between the working class and the peasantry, advocated a system of militias with elected officers as part of a system of self-governing communes and workplaces and argued the time was ripe for revolutionary action, stating that "we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda".


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: These ideas corresponded strikingly closely with the program of the Paris Commune of 1871, much of which was developed by followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as the Marxist and Blanquist factions had voted for confrontation with the army while the Proudhonions had supported a truce. Bakunin was a strong supporter of the Commune which was brutally suppressed by the French government. He saw the Commune as above all a "rebellion against the State" and commended the Communards for rejecting not only the state but also revolutionary dictatorship. In a series of powerful pamphlets, he defended the Commune and the First International against the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, thereby winning over many Italian republicans to the International and the cause of revolutionary socialism.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin's disagreements with Marx, which led to the attempt by the Marx party to expel him at the Hague Congress (see below), illustrated the growing divergence between the "anti-authoritarian" sections of the International which advocated the direct revolutionary action and organization of the workers and peasants in order to abolish the state and capitalism and the sections allied with Marx which advocated the conquest of political power by the working class. Bakunin was "Marx's flamboyant chief opponent" and "presciently warned against the emergence of a communist authoritarianism that would take power over working people."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: The anti-authoritarian majority which included most sections of the International created their own International at the 1872 St. Imier Congress, adopted a revolutionary anarchist program, and repudiated the Hague resolutions, rescinding Bakunin's alleged expulsion. Although Bakunin accepted elements of Marx's class analysis and theories regarding capitalism, acknowledging "Marx's genius", he thought Marx's analysis was one-sided, and that Marx's methods would compromise the social revolution. More importantly, Bakunin criticized "authoritarian socialism" (which he associated with Marxism) and the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat which he adamantly refused.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: In 1874, Bakunin retired with his young wife Antonia Kwiatkowska and three children to Minusio (near Locarno in Switzerland), in a villa called "La Baronata" that the leader of the Italian anarchists Carlo Cafiero had bought for him by selling his own estates in his native town Barletta (Apulia). His daughter Maria Bakunin (1873–1960) became a chemist and biologist. His daughter Sofia was the mother of Italian mathematician Renato Caccioppoli.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin died in Bern on 1 July 1876. His grave can be found in "Bremgarten Cemetery" of Bern, , . His original epitaph reads: "Remember him who sacrificed everything for the freedom of his country". In 2015, the commemorative plate was replaced in form of a bronze portrait of Bakunin by Swiss artist Daniel Garbade containing Bakunin's quote: "By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible". It was sponsored by the Dadaists of Cabaret Voltaire Zurich, who adopted Bakunin post mortem.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin joined the Scottish Lodge of the Grand Orient de France in 1845, but his involvement with freemasonry lapsed until he was in Florence in the summer of 1864. Garibaldi had attended the first real Italian Masonic Constituent Assembly in Florence in May of that year, and been elected Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy. Here, the local head of the Mazzinist party was also grand master of the local lodge. Although he was soon to dismiss freemasonry, it was in this period that he abandoned his previous belief in a god and embraced atheism. He formulated the phrase "God exists, therefore man is a slave. Man is free, therefore there is no God. Escape this dilemma who can!" which appeared in his unpublished "Catechism of a freemason". It was during this period that he established the International Revolutionary Association with Italian revolutionaries who had broken with Mazzini because they rejected his Deism as well as his purely ‘political' conception of the revolution, which they saw as being bourgeois with no element of a social revolution.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin's political beliefs rejected statist and hierarchical systems of power in every name and shape, from the idea of God downwards, and every form of hierarchical authority, whether emanating from the will of a sovereign or even from a state that allowed universal suffrage. He wrote in "God and the State" that "[t]he liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual".


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin similarly rejected the notion of any privileged position or class, since the social and economic inequality implied by class systems were incompatible with individual freedom. Whereas liberalism insisted that free markets and constitutional governments enabled individual freedom, Bakunin insisted that both capitalism and the state in any form were incompatible with the individual freedom of the working class and peasantry, stating that "it is the peculiarity of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the intellect and heart of man. The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart". Bakunin's political beliefs were based on several interrelated concepts: (1) liberty; (2) socialism; (3) federalism; (4) anti-theism; and (5) materialism. He also developed a critique of Marxism, predicting that if the Marxists were successful in seizing power, they would create a party dictatorship "all the more dangerous because it appears as a sham expression of the people's will", adding that "[w]hen the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'".


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: According to political philosopher Carl Schmitt, "in comparison with later anarchists, Proudhon was a moralistic petit bourgeois who continued to subscribe to the authority of the father and the principle of the monogamous family. Bakunin was the first to give the struggle against theology the complete consistency of an absolute naturalism. [...] For him, therefore, there was nothing negative and evil except the theological doctrine of God and sin, which stamps man as a villain in order to provide a pretext for domination and the hunger for power."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin believed that religion originated from the human ability for abstract thought and fantasy. According to Bakunin, religion is sustained by indoctrination and conformism. Other factors in the survival of religion are poverty, suffering and exploitation, from which religion promises salvation in the afterlife. Oppressors take advantage of religion because many religious people reconcile themselves with injustice on earth by the promise of happiness in heaven.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin argued that oppressors receive authority from religion. Religious people are in many cases obedient to the priests, because they believe that the statements of priests are based on direct divine revelation or scripture. Obedience to divine revelation or scripture is considered the ethical criterion by many religious people because God is considered as the omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent being. Therefore, each statement considered derived from an infallible God cannot be criticized by humans. According to this religious way of thinking, humans cannot know by themselves what is just, but that only God decides what is good or evil. People who disobey the "messengers of God" are threatened with punishment in hell. According to Bakunin, the alternative for a religious power monopoly is the acknowledgement that all humans are equally inspired by God, but that means that multiple contradictory teachings are assigned to an infallible God which is logically impossible. Therefore, Bakunin considers religion as necessarily authoritarian.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin argued in his book "God and the State" that "the idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, in theory and practice". Consequently, Bakunin reversed Voltaire's famous aphorism that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him, writing instead that "if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him". Political theology is a branch of both political philosophy and theology that investigates the ways in which theological concepts or ways of thinking underlie political, social, economic and cultural discourses. Bakunin was an early proponent of the term "political theology" in his 1871 text "The Political Theology of Mazzini and the International", to which Schmitt's eponymous book responded.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin's methods of realizing his revolutionary program were consistent with his principles. The working class and peasantry were to organize from below through local structures federated with each other, "creating not only the ideas, but also the facts of the future itself." Their movements would prefigure the future in their ideas and practices, creating the building blocks of the new society. This approach was exemplified by syndicalism, an anarchist strategy championed by Bakunin, according to which trade unions would provide both the means to defend and improve workers' conditions, rights and incomes in the present, and the basis for a social revolution based upon workplace occupations. The syndicalist unions would organize the occupations as well as provide the radically democratic structures through which workplaces would be self-managed, and the larger economy coordinated. Thus, for Bakunin, the workers' unions would "take possession of all the tools of production as well as buildings and capital."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Nevertheless, Bakunin did not reduce the revolution to syndicalist unions, stressing the need to organize working-class neighborhoods as well as the unemployed. Meanwhile, the peasants were to "take the land and throw out those landlords who live by the labor of others". Bakunin did not dismiss the skilled workers as is sometimes claimed and the watchmakers of the Jura region were central to the St. Imier International's creation and operations. However, at a time when unions largely ignored the unskilled, Bakunin placed great emphasis on the need to organize as well among "the rabble" and "the great masses of the poor and exploited, the so-called "lumpenproletariat" to "inaugurate and bring to triumph the Social Revolution."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin's socialism was known as "collectivist anarchism", where "socially: it seeks the confirmation of political equality by economic equality. This is not the removal of natural individual differences, but equality in the social rights of every individual from birth; in particular, equal means of subsistence, support, education, and opportunity for every child, boy or girl, until maturity, and equal resources and facilities in adulthood to create his own well-being by his own labor."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Collectivist anarchism advocates the abolition of both the state and private ownership of the means of production. Instead, it envisions the means of production being owned collectively and controlled and managed by the producers themselves. For the collectivization of the means of production, it was originally envisaged that workers would revolt and forcibly collectivize the means of production. Once collectivization takes place, money would be abolished to be replaced with labour notes and workers' salaries would be determined in democratic organizations based on job difficulty and the amount of time they contributed to production. These salaries would be used to buy goods in a communal market.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: The dispute between Bakunin and Karl Marx highlighted the differences between anarchism and Marxism. He strongly rejected Marx's concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in which the new state would be unopposed and would, theoretically, represent the workers. He argued that the state should be immediately abolished because all forms of government eventually lead to oppression. He also vehemently opposed vanguardism, in which a political elite of revolutionaries guide the workers. Bakunin insisted that revolutions must be led by the people directly while any "enlightened elite" must exert influence only by remaining "invisible [...] not imposed on anyone [...] [and] deprived of all official rights and significance". Bakunin claimed that Marxists "maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up". Bakunin further stated that "we are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality".


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: While both anarchists and Marxists share the same final goal, the creation of a free, egalitarian society without social classes and repressive/bureaucratic government, they strongly disagree on how to achieve this goal. Anarchists believe that the classless, stateless society should be established by the direct action of the masses, culminating in social revolution and refuse any intermediate stage such as the dictatorship of the proletariat on the basis that such a dictatorship will become a self-perpetuating fundament. For Bakunin, the fundamental contradiction is that for the Marxists "anarchism or freedom is the aim, while the state and dictatorship is the means, and so, in order to free the masses, they have first to be enslaved." However, Bakunin also wrote of meeting Marx in 1844: "As far as learning was concerned, Marx was, and still is, incomparably more advanced than I. I knew nothing at that time of political economy, I had not yet rid myself of my metaphysical observations. [...] He called me a sentimental idealist and he was right; I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty, and I also was right". Bakunin found Marx's economic analysis very useful and began the job of translating "Das Kapital" into Russian. In turn, Marx wrote of the rebels in the Dresden insurrection of 1848 that "they found a capable and cool headed leader" in the "Russian refugee Michael Bakunin." Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels of meeting Bakunin in 1864 after his escape to Siberia, stating: "On the whole he is one of the few people whom I find not to have retrogressed after 16 years, but to have developed further."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin has sometimes been called the first theorist of the "new class", meaning that a class of intellectuals and bureaucrats running the state in the name of the people or the proletariat, but in reality in their own interests alone. Bakunin argued that "[t]he State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class: a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class. And finally, when all the other classes have exhausted themselves, the State then becomes the patrimony of the bureaucratic class and then falls—or, if you will, rises—to the position of a machine."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: By federalism, Bakunin meant the organization of society "from the base to the summit—from the circumference to the center—according to the principles of free association and federation." Consequently, society would be organized "on the basis of the absolute freedom of individuals, of the productive associations, and of the communes", with "every individual, every association, every commune, every region, every nation" having "the absolute right to self-determination, to associate or not to associate, to ally themselves with whomever they wish."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: By liberty, Bakunin did not mean an abstract ideal but a concrete reality based on the equal liberty of others. In a positive sense, liberty consists of "the fullest development of all the faculties and powers of every human being, by education, by scientific training, and by material prosperity." Such a conception of liberty is "eminently social, because it can only be realized in society", not in isolation. In a negative sense, liberty is "the revolt of the individual against all divine, collective, and individual authority."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin denied religious concepts of a supernatural sphere and advocated a materialist explanation of natural phenomena, for "the manifestations of organic life, chemical properties and reactions, electricity, light, warmth and the natural attraction of physical bodies, constitute in our view so many different but no less closely interdependent variants of that totality of real beings which we call matter." For Bakunin, The "mission of science is, by observation of the general relations of passing and real facts, to establish the general laws inherent in the development of the phenomena of the physical and social world."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin differed from Marx's on the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat, for "[b]oth agreed that the proletariat would play a key role, but for Marx the proletariat was the exclusive, leading revolutionary agent while Bakunin entertained the possibility that the peasants and even the lumpenproletariat (the unemployed, common criminals, etc.) could rise to the occasion." According to Nicholas Thoburn, "Bakunin considers workers' integration in capital as "destructive" of more primary revolutionary forces. For Bakunin, the revolutionary archetype is found in a peasant milieu (which is presented as having longstanding insurrectionary traditions, as well as a communist archetype in its "current" social form—the peasant commune) and amongst educated unemployed youth, assorted marginals from all classes, brigands, robbers, the impoverished masses, and those on the margins of society who have escaped, been excluded from, or not yet subsumed in the discipline of emerging industrial work—in short, all those whom Marx sought to include in the category of the lumpenproletariat."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin has had a major influence on labour, peasant and left-wing movements, although this was overshadowed from the 1920s by the rise of Marxist regimes. With the collapse of those regimes—and growing awareness of how closely those regimes corresponded to the dictatorships Bakunin predicted—Bakunin's ideas have rapidly gained ground amongst activists, in some cases again overshadowing neo-Marxism. Bakunin is remembered as a major figure in the history of anarchism and as an opponent of Marxism, especially of Marx's idea of dictatorship of the proletariat and for his astute predictions that Marxist regimes would be one-party dictatorships over the proletariat, not of the proletariat itself. "God and the State" was translated multiple times by other anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker, Marie Le Compte and Emma Goldman.


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Mark Leier, Bakunin's biographer, writes that "Bakunin had a significant influence on later thinkers, ranging from Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta to the Wobblies and Spanish anarchists in the Civil War to Herbert Marcuse, E.P. Thompson, Neil Postman, and A.S. Neill, down to the anarchists gathered these days under the banner of 'anti-globalization.'"


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: According to McLaughlin, Bakunin has been accused of being a closet authoritarian. In his letter to Albert Richard, he wrote that "[t]here is only one power and one dictatorship whose organisation is salutary and feasible: it is that collective, invisible dictatorship of those who are allied in the name of our principle". According to Madison, Bakunin "rejected political action as a means of abolishing the state and developed the doctrine of revolutionary conspiracy under autocratic leadership—disregarding the conflict of this principle with his philosophy of anarchism". According to Peter Marshall, "[i]t is difficult not to conclude that Bakunin's invisible dictatorship would be even more tyrannical than a Blanquist or Marxist one, for its policies could not be openly known or discussed."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Madison contended that it was Bakunin's scheming for control of the First International that brought about his rivalry with Karl Marx and his expulsion from it in 1872: "His approval of violence as a weapon against the agents of oppression led to nihilism in Russia and to individual acts of terrorism elsewhere—with the result that anarchism became generally synonymous with assassination and chaos." However, Bakunin's supporters argue that this "invisible dictatorship" is not a dictatorship in any conventional sense of the word. Their influence would be ideological and freely accepted, stating: "Denouncing all power, with what sort of power, or rather by what sort of force, shall we direct a people's revolution? By a force that is invisible [...] that is not imposed on anyone [...] [and] deprived of all official rights and significance."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin was also criticized by Marx and the delegates of the International specifically because his methods of organization were similar to those of Sergey Nechayev, with whom Bakunin was closely associated. While Bakunin rebuked Nechayev upon discovery of his duplicity as well as his amoral politics, he did retain a streak of ruthlessness, as indicated by a 2 June 1870 letter: "Lies, cunning [and] entanglement [are] a necessary and marvelous means for demoralising and destroying the enemy, though "certainly not" a useful means of obtaining and attracting new friends."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Nevertheless, Bakunin began warning friends about Nechayev's behavior and broke off all relations with Nechayev. Moreover, others note that Bakunin never sought to take personal control of the International, that his secret organisations were not subject to his autocratic power, and that he condemned terrorism as counter-revolutionary. Robert M. Cutler goes further, pointing out that it is impossible fully to understand either Bakunin's participation in the League of Peace and Freedom or the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, or his idea of a secret revolutionary organisation that is immanent in the people, without seeing that they derive from his interpretation of Hegel's dialectic from the 1840s. Cutler argues that the script of Bakunin's dialectic gave the Alliance the purpose of providing the International with a real revolutionary organisation. Cutler further states:


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Sociologist Marcel Stoetzler claims that Bakunin "put the existence of a Jewish conspiracy to control the world at the center of his political thinking." He points out that, in Bakunin's Appeal to Slavs (1848), "he wrote that the 'Jewish sect' was a 'veritable power in Europe,' reigning despotically over commerce and banking and invading most areas of journalism. 'Woe to him who makes the mistake of displeasing it!'" Stoetzler explains that "Conspiracy thinking, cult of violence, hatred of law, fecundity of destruction, Slavic ethnonationalism and antisemitism ... were inseparable from Bakunin's revolutionary anarchism."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Alvin Rosenfeld, the Director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, agrees that Bakunin's antisemitism is intertwined with his anarchist ideology. In his attacks on Marx, for instance, Bakunin states:


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: In Bakunin's view, wherever "such a bank exists the parasitic Jewish nation, which speculates in the labor of the people will always find means to exist." Rosenfeld points out how Bakunin's antisemitic views were tied to his anarchist disdain for a strong centralized bank. Steve Cohen, as well, argues that "Bakuninʹs own justification of anarchy was remarkable in that it was founded explicitly on his own belief in the world Jewish conspiracy. He saw both capitalism and communism as being based on centralised state structures at all times controlled by Jews."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: For Bakunin, the Jewish people is not a social demographic, but rather is an exploitative class in and of itself. In letters to the Bologna section of the International, Bakunin writes:


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Rosenfeld explains that Bakunin's antisemitism has fed into anti-Jewish populism in 19th century Russia and has left an antisemitic legacy in the anarchist ideological tradition. Rosenfeld brings up the example of a Jewish narodnik who complained about his comrades: "They make no distinction between Jews and gentry; they were "preaching the extermination of both." Rosenfeld explains that radicals often also failed to condemn anti-Jewish populist riots that arose in the 1880s due to their perceived "revolutionary" and "mass" character. Some even went so far as to use popular anti-Jewish sentiment in their ideological advocacy. 'While the reactionaries would use Jewish blood to put out the fire of rebellion," it was noted, "their adversaries were not averse to using it to feed the flames."' Indeed, the Narodnaya Volya of Russia, a pre-Bolshevik organization with Bakuninist and popularist tendencies, called for the masses to revolt against the "Jewish Tzar," for "soon over the whole Russian land there will arise a revolt against the Tsar, the lords and the Jews."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Bakunin's biographer, Simon Fraser University historian Mark Leier claimed in an interview with Iain McKay that "Bakunin's anti-Semitism has been greatly misunderstood. At virtually every talk I've given on Bakunin, I'm asked about it. Where it exists, it is repellent, but it takes up about 5 pages of the thousands of pages he wrote, was written in the heat of his battles with Marx, where Bakunin was slandered viciously, and needs to be understood in the context of the 19th century."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: Rosenfeld responded that Bakunin's ideas have been since valued independently of his antisemitism, and many of the movements that followed him and many of his greatest admirers, such as Peter Kropotkin, Gustav Landauer, and Rudolf Rocker, harbored no antisemitic belief; Leir's "attitude to situating Proudhon and Bakunin's politics, however, easily underestimates the force of anti-Jewish prejudice, and how it unconsciously shapes less extrovert aspects of Bakunin's ideology."


title: Mikhail Bakunin

text: English translations of Bakunin's texts are rare compared to the comprehensive editions in French by Arthur Lehning or those in German and Spanish. AK Press is producing an eight-volume complete works in English. Madelaine Grawitz's biography (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 2000) remains to be translated.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: Battle: Los Angeles (also known as Battle: LA, stylised as Battle Los Angeles in the opening sequence and internationally as World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles) is a 2011 American military science-fiction action film directed by Jonathan Liebesman. The storyline was conceived from a screenplay written by Chris Bertolini, based in part on a World War II incident dubbed the "Battle of Los Angeles". The film is set in modern-day Los Angeles and follows a Marine Staff Sergeant played by Aaron Eckhart who leads a platoon of U.S. Marines, joined by other stranded military personnel, during a global alien invasion. The ensemble cast includes Michelle Rodriguez, Ramon Rodriguez, Bridget Moynahan, Ne-Yo, and Michael Peña.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: The film was a co-production of Columbia Pictures, Relativity Media, and Original Film. It was distributed by Columbia, while Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released the film in the video rental market. The film won the BMI TV Music Award for composer Brian Tyler. The film score was orchestrated by Tyler in conjunction with the Hollywood Studio Symphony. The soundtrack was released by the Varèse Sarabande music label on March 8, 2011.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: Principal photography began in September 2009, and the film was released in the United States on March 11, 2011. It grossed $211 million worldwide against a production budget of around $70 million, and received generally negative reviews from critics. It was released on DVD and Blu-ray on June 14, 2011.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: On August 12, 2011, a number of apparent meteors landed in the world's oceans, near 20 major coastal cities. The objects prove to be spacecraft containing hostile extraterrestrials. As Los Angeles (LA) is being evacuated, Marines from Camp Pendleton arrive, including Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz, an Iraq War veteran. Nantz, who was to begin his retirement, is assigned to the 1st Platoon, Echo Company, of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: Under the command of 2nd Lieutenant William Martinez, the platoon arrives at a forward operating base (FOB) established at Santa Monica Airport. The alien ground forces have no apparent air support, so the Air Force prepares to carpet bomb the Santa Monica area, and the platoon is given three hours to retrieve civilians from an LAPD station in West LA. As they advance through LA, they are ambushed and suffer multiple casualties. Nantz takes Marines Imlay and Harris to look for Lenihan, who is missing from the group. After fighting off an alien, they team up with some soldiers from the 40th Infantry Division and an Air Force intelligence Technical Sergeant, Elena Santos. At the police station, the makeshift platoon finds five civilians: veterinarian Michele, children Kirsten, Amy and Hector, and Hector's father Joe. A helicopter arrives to evacuate wounded Marines, but cannot take on the weight of the civilians. During takeoff, it is destroyed by alien air units, killing Grayston, Guerrero, Lenihan, and Simmons.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: The Marines commandeer an abandoned transit bus for the evacuation. En route, they deduce that the alien air units are drones that target human radio transmissions. Santos reveals that her mission is to locate the aliens' command and control center, as its destruction should deactivate the drones. When their bus comes under attack on an elevated freeway, the Marines rappel the group to street level. In the ensuing battle, Marines Stavrou and Mottola and the remainder of the Army National Guard soldiers are killed, while both Joe and Lieutenant Martinez are wounded fighting the aliens. Martinez uses his radio to attract the aliens, then detonates explosives, sacrificing himself. Nantz is now in command of surviving personnel Santos, Imlay, Kerns, Lockett, Harris, Adukwu and the civilians, continuing their escape from the bombing zone. A news report interviews a scientist who speculates that the aliens are seeking Earth's water for fuel while eradicating the human population.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: The carpet bombing never happens. Reaching the FOB, the Marines find it destroyed and that the military is retreating from LA. The Marines plan to escort the civilians to an alternate extraction point. When Joe dies from his wounds, Nantz comforts Hector. Lockett confronts Nantz regarding his brother, a Marine who, with four others, was killed during Nantz's last tour. They come to peace when Nantz explains that he continues to think of them, and recites each one's name, rank and serial number. Nantz motivates the group to move forward to honor their fallen comrades, including Joe for his bravery. They reach the extraction point and evacuate by helicopter.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: In flight, the chopper experiences a brief loss of power. Nantz theorizes that they are flying near the alien command center, transmitting intense radio messages to its drones. He orders his unit to accompany the civilians while he stays to reconnoiter the area, but his fighters all join him. Searching through sewers, they confirm the presence of a large alien vessel. Kerns radios in to request missiles, which Nantz manually directs using a laser designator while the others defend his position. Kerns is killed when a drone homes in on his radio, but the Marines succeed in routing a missile to the command module, which is destroyed. The uncontrolled drones fall from the sky, and the alien ground forces retreat.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: The remaining fighters—Nantz, Imlay, Lockett, Harris, Adukwu and Santos—are evacuated to a base in the Mojave Desert, where they are greeted as heroes. They are told that their successful method has been transmitted to the armies battling alien forces in 19 other cities, that Michele and the three children were rescued, and that they can now rest. Instead, they re-arm and join the armed force leaving to retake Los Angeles.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: Jonathan Liebesman intended the film to be a realistic depiction of an alien invasion in the style of a war film, taking inspiration from the films "Black Hawk Down", "Saving Private Ryan", and "United 93" for his documentary style of filming. Liebesman also drew inspiration from YouTube videos of Marines fighting in Fallujah for the look of the film. As a result, the film was not shot in 3D as the director felt that combined with the handheld camera style of shooting would make the audience "throw up in two minutes." Instead, standard film was used, intercutting footage from three different cameras. The filmmakers tested shooting the film digitally on a Red camera, but found the camera could not capture the same quality image as standard film. The film was shot for a PG-13 rating, as the director felt making the film overly gory did not suit the more suspenseful tone they were trying to achieve. Screenwriter Chris Bertolini tried to include humour and suspense as well as action, which he felt were important elements to help draw the audience into the drama.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: In an interview with IGN, Liebesman described the interaction between actors, as well as the natural development of the film during pre-production exclaiming, "What comes out of that is a lot of tiny little details and tiny things that these guys bring out." He also noted, "Whether it's, just off the top of my head, Ne-Yo, who plays Harris, and Gino [Pesi], who plays Stavrou, have a great relationship, a lot of which they made up behind the scenes. Just little things, characters that you thought, 'Ah, s--t this wasn't really in the script.' These guys, like Guerrero (Neil Brown Jr.). He's one of the guys way back there but he's got a personality and he brought it and it was just stuff you don't expect."


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: The film's story was partly inspired by the Battle of Los Angeles, a rumored enemy attack and subsequent anti-aircraft artillery barrage that took place in Los Angeles during World War II, on the night of February 24, 1942. The incident occurred a day after the Bombardment of Ellwood when an Imperial Japanese submarine launched shells at US aviation fuel tanks; West-coast tensions were already running high in the months after the December 1941 Pearl Harbor Attack and entry of the US into World War II. Eyewitnesses and radar data reported an unknown aerial craft over the Los Angeles area on February 24, leading to fears of a Japanese attack on the US mainland. But a review of the incident found no proof of Japanese presence in the area and attributed the incident to an overreaction by US military forces. In later years, UFO investigators speculated the aircraft spotted on the night was an extraterrestrial craft.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: This real incident was used as the main focus of an early teaser trailer to promote the film, in which it is strongly implied the alien invaders spent decades planning their attack and invasion. The filmmakers drew upon this historical event in an attempt to help ground the film in reality. Aaron Eckhart said that the objective of the film was to make as realistic an alien invasion movie as possible; "The goal was: this is a war movie, a documentary-style war movie—with aliens in it." The film, however, was not the first motion picture to touch upon the events surrounding the tale of the Pacific air raids. In 1979, the comedy drama film "1941" directed by Steven Spielberg, alluded to the 1942 shelling as well as other surprise military engagements. On March 12, 2011, a day after the official release for "Battle: Los Angeles", a mockbuster produced by the independent film company The Asylum, entitled "Battle of Los Angeles", premiered on the Syfy cable TV channel in the United States.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: Filming took place from September 2009 through December 2009 in Shreveport and Baton Rouge, Louisiana (with some scenes filmed at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, California). Louisiana was chosen instead of Los Angeles mainly due to financial advantages. Principal photography began in the second week of September in Shreveport with scenes depicting a destroyed interstate filled with cars, an overturned tanker truck, and a crashed helicopter. Post-production lasted throughout 2010 and into 2011. Special effects used in the principal photography included pyrotechnics. The most climactic of all was a large fireball-producing explosion which was said to have alarmed some residents and passers-by. Film crews used a large "green-screen" billboard at the base (end) of the "destroyed" interstate to use later for inserting CGI images of Los Angeles. The actors went through three weeks of boot camp, in order to learn how to realistically operate as a Marine platoon. In addition, Eckhart had done training with the Marines for a few months beforehand in weapons training and drills. On set, military technical advisors worked with the actors to ensure they gave a realistic performance. Eckhart broke his upper arm when he fell off a ledge during an action sequence, but continued to work for the remainder of the film without having it put in a cast.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: There was military support for filming. Numerous Marine units assisted in filming, including infantry from 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, MV-22 Ospreys from VMMT-204 (based at Marine Corps Air Station New River in North Carolina), CH-46 Sea Knights from HMM-268 and HMM-774 (based in Camp Pendleton and Naval Station Norfolk, respectively), and reservists from 3rd Battalion, 23rd Marines based in Belle Chasse, Louisiana.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: While Liebesman tried to use practical effects whenever possible (although green screen and CGI were used), such as for explosions, 90% of the aliens are computer-generated, as the director felt they would be too difficult to achieve any other way. The invaders were designed by Paul Gerrard, who made them to appear "very alien", neither arthropod nor vertebrate, while Liebesman described them as "genocidal Nazis... They look at us like we look at ants." Liebesman wanted the aliens to appear to function as a real army, complete with medics and different ranking officers, and using tactics such as taking cover to protect themselves. Liebesman also confirmed that the aliens are invading for the Earth's natural resources, specifically because the Earth is 70% covered with water.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: Sony investigated the possibility of legal action against the filmmakers Greg and Colin Strause, who were hired to do visual effects work on "Battle: Los Angeles" through their special effects company Hydraulx. Sony suspected the Strause brothers had created their own Los Angeles-based alien invasion film "Skyline", which would compete with the "Battle: Los Angeles" release, by using resources they had gained while working on the film without the consent of Sony Pictures. A spokesman for the Strauses responded by saying, "Any claims of impropriety are completely baseless. This is a blatant attempt by Sony to force these independent filmmakers to move a release date that has long been set by Universal and Relativity and is outside the filmmakers' control." Sony initiated arbitration against Hydraulx and the Strause brothers, but later dismissed the arbitration.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: The score was composed & conducted by Brian Tyler and performed by the Hollywood Studio Symphony. The soundtrack for the film released on March 8, 2011. A song used in the trailer is "The Sun's Gone Dim and the Sky's Turned Black" by Jóhann Jóhannsson. Songs used in the film were "California Love" by 2Pac featuring Dr. Dre and Roger Troutman but not included on the soundtrack album.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: The film had its world premiere in the United States on March 11, 2011. The next day, on March 12, it premiered in the Asia Pacific region in Taiwan. Other European markets in Germany and Denmark had the film premiering on April 14. The film made its debut in Sweden on April 20 and Switzerland on April 22. It went into general theatrical release in Latin America in Argentina on March 10. Certain Middle Eastern markets; the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon saw the premiere of the film on March 10, while in South Africa it screened later in the month on March 25.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: A first-person shooter video game developed by Saber Interactive subsidiary Live Action Studios and published by Konami was released on Xbox Live Arcade on March 11, 2011. The OnLive game service (as part of its Playpack subscription service) was made available to subscribers on March 15, and on the PlayStation Network on March 22. Eckhart reprised his role for the game. Players assume the role of Corporal Lee Imlay throughout the game. The Xbox 360 version of the game received generally unfavorable reviews on Metacritic, scoring a 39 out of 100 based on 21 critics. It sold over 60,000 copies on the Xbox 360 as of year-end 2011.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: Following its cinematic release in theaters, the Region 1 Code widescreen edition of the film was released on DVD by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment in the United States on June 14, 2011. Special features for the DVD include; Behind The Battle, Building the Aliens, Acting with Aliens, Shooting the Aliens, Preparing for Battle, and Creating L.A. in LA. Additionally, a combo two-disc Blu-ray Disc/DVD was also released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on June 14, 2011. Special features for the DVD/Blu-ray Disc pack include; PS3 Theme, Behind The Battle, Directing the Battle, Building the Aliens, Acting with Aliens, Shooting the Aliens, Preparing for Battle, Boot Camp, Creating L.A. in LA, The Freeway Battle, Command Control, Staff Sergeant Nantz, Marine Behind The Scenes, Aliens Ambush The Marines, Battling Unknown Forces, Technical Sergeant Santos, Alien Autopsy, Gas Station Explosion, Visual FX on the Freeway, Do You Believe in Aliens?, and Alien Command & Control.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: Concurrently, the widescreen hi-definition Blu-ray version of the film was released on June 14, 2011, too. Special features include; PS3 Theme, Resistance 3 Game Demo Hybrid—PS3 Game, Behind The Battle, Directing the Battle, Building the Aliens, Acting with Aliens, Shooting the Aliens, Preparing for Battle, Boot Camp, Creating L.A. in LA, The Freeway Battle, Command Control, Staff Sergeant Nantz, Marine Behind The Scenes, Aliens Ambush The Marines, Battling Unknown Forces, Technical Sergeant Santos, Alien Autopsy, Gas Station Explosion, Visual FX on the Freeway, Do You Believe in Aliens?, and Alien Command & Control. A supplemental viewing option for the film in the media format of video on demand is available as well.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: "Battle: Los Angeles" is one of the first titles to be re-mastered in the ultra-high resolution format 4K.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a rating of 37% based on 212 reviews, with an average rating of 4.9/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Overlong and overly burdened with war movie clichés, "Battle: Los Angeles" will entertain only the most ardent action junkies." Review aggregator Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 37 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: Noted film critic Roger Ebert panned "Battle: Los Angeles" in a lengthy review, calling the movie "noisy, violent, ugly and stupid", giving the film a mere half star rating. Though he praised Aaron Eckhart's performance, Ebert heavily criticized the film's writing, effects designs, camerawork and editing. He closed his review by saying, "When I think of the elegant construction of something like "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral", I want to rend the hair from my head and weep bitter tears of despair. Generations of filmmakers devoted their lives to perfecting techniques that a director like Jonathan Liebesman is either ignorant of, or indifferent to. Yet he is given millions of dollars to produce this assault on the attention span of a generation." Anthony Lane of "The New Yorker" gave the film a better review only by comparing it to films that were worse, stating: ""Battle: Los Angeles" is a lot more fun than bludgeoning, soul-draining follies like "Terminator Salvation" or the "Transformers" films."


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: "Battle: Los Angeles" was largely given poor reviews by the "Los Angeles Times", "The New York Times", "USA Today", "Entertainment Weekly", and "Variety". One stand out, the "San Francisco Chronicle", gave it a sympathetic review. Kim Newman of "Empire" rated the film 2 stars out of 5, conceding that the combat scenes were good, but criticizing its lack of originality, writing "Things blow up good and Eckhart is a classier actor than his role warrants, but we've all been here before." Nigel Floyd of "Time Out" rated the film 2 stars saying that it "... lumbers the flat military characters with hackneyed dialogue and corny sentimentality".


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: Neil Smith of "Total Film" magazine rated the film as 3 stars out of 5 and summarized, "Imagine "Black Hawk Down" with ET's instead of Somalis and you'll have the measure of an explosive if functional actioner that will do while we're waiting for summer's big guns to arrive". Movie critic Michael Phillips of the "Chicago Tribune" also rated the film 3 out of 5 stars, remarking how the story was "gratifyingly narrow: It's about a handful of people trying to get a handful of blocks to a safe zone on the west side of LA, and not get killed in the process. The saving-the-world part is almost an afterthought." In mild positive sentiment, Ty Burr of "The Boston Globe" emphatically stated that the film was a "loud, frenetic, viscerally gripping two-hour tour of duty that mostly plays fair by the rules of the genre and mostly avoids macho posturing." Similarly, Connie Ogle of the "Miami Herald" deduced that "Battle: Los Angeles" was "not so goofy as "Independence Day", not so terrifying as "War of the Worlds", and it utterly lacks the imagination and emotional resonance of "District 9"" but was a "solid popcorn movie, with plenty of action, explosions and low-key mayhem unlikely to scar even the most fragile of psyches." In his review for The Arizona Republic, critic Bill Goodykoontz called the film "good, dumb fun." Michael Phillips wrote in The Chicago Tribune, "Original, it's not. Exciting, it is. This jacked-up B-movie hybrid of "Black Hawk Down" and "War of the Worlds" is a modest but crafty triumph of tension over good sense and cliche."


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: "Battle: Los Angeles" received an award nomination for actor Peña in the category of "Favorite Movie Actor", along with a nomination for Rodriguez for "Favorite Movie Actress" from the ALMA Awards. Additionally, composer Tyler won the BMI TV Music Award for his work on the film.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: "Battle: Los Angeles" debuted on March 11, 2011, in the United States screening at 3,417 theaters. It grossed $13,399,310 on its opening day, which was the best opening-day gross for 2011 until the record was surpassed by "Fast Five". Overall, the film made $35,573,187 and ranked number one on its opening weekend ahead of "Red Riding Hood" and "Mars Needs Moms". The film dropped to No. 2 after a week when "Rango" topped the box office on St. Patrick's Day. During its final week in release, "Battle: Los Angeles" opened in a distant 46th place with $68,843 in revenue. At the end of its run in 2011, the film has grossed $83,552,429 in the United States and Canadian markets and $128,266,925 in international markets, for a worldwide total of $211,819,354.


title: Battle: Los Angeles

text: Eckhart has stated he would be interested in returning for a sequel. In an interview on March 25, 2012, director Jonathan Liebesman announced that work on a script for a sequel had begun. He also commented that the budget "will be as big."


title: Chris Fischer

text: Chris Fischer is an American chef and farmer from Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. He is the husband of stand-up comedian and actress Amy Schumer.


title: Chris Fischer

text: A native of Martha's Vineyard, Fischer grew up on a farm and learned about food from his father, Albert, a former commercial fisherman, who taught him how to hunt, fish and farm. Fischer spent much of his boyhood at Martha's Vineyard and went to a two-room schoolhouse that has since been converted into a police station.


title: Chris Fischer

text: When he became a chef, he worked under Mario Batali at Babbo while living in Manhattan. He also cooked in Europe, working at the American Academy in Rome and London's The River Cafe before returning to Martha's Vineyard to work there full-time in 2007.


title: Chris Fischer

text: Fischer ran his family farm, Beetlebung Farm, a five-acre property that his grandfather purchased in the 1950s or in 1961. He was the executive chef at the Beach Plum Inn & Restaurant for several years and was awarded the 2014 StarChefs.com Coastal New England Rising Stars Award. In 2016, he was awarded with the James Beard Award for his book The Beetlebung Farm Cookbook, which he wrote with co-author Catherine Young. He was also a part-time instructor at Boston University's Metropolitan College Programs in Food & Wine.


title: Chris Fischer

text: Fischer married comedian and actress Amy Schumer on February 13, 2018, in Malibu, California. On May 5, 2019, Schumer gave birth to their son, Gene. Gene was initially given the middle name "Attell" as a nod to Dave Attell, but on April 14, 2020, Schumer announced in a podcast that his middle name had been changed to "David" after they realized "Gene Attell" sounded like "genital." Schumer revealed in her Netflix special "Amy Schumer Growing" that Chris Fischer is on the autism spectrum.


title: Chris Fischer

text: His cookbook, "The Beetlebung Farm Cookbook", which memorialized a year of cooking and living on Martha's Vineyard, won the 2016 James Beard Award for American Cooking.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films." Criterion serves film and media scholars, cinephiles and public and academic libraries. Criterion has helped to standardize certain aspects of home-video releases such as film restoration, the letterboxing format for widescreen films and the inclusion of bonus features such as scholarly essays and commentary tracks. Criterion has produced and distributed more than 1,000 special editions of its films in VHS, Betamax, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray formats and box sets. These films and their special features are also available via an online streaming service that the company operates.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: The company was founded in 1984 by Robert Stein, Aleen Stein and Joe Medjuck, who later were joined by Roger Smith. In 1985, the Steins, William Becker and Jonathan B. Turell founded the Voyager Company to publish educational multimedia CD-ROMs (1989–2000), and the Criterion Collection became a subordinate division of the Voyager Company, with Janus Films holding a minority stake in the company, and decided to expand its product on videocassettes and videodiscs. In March 1994, Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH bought 20% of Voyager for US$6.7 million; the four founders each retained a 20% owner's share.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: In 1997, the Voyager Company was dissolved (Aleen Stein founded the Organa LLC CD-ROM publishing company), and Holtzbrinck Publishers sold the Voyager brand name, 42 CD-ROM titles, the Voyager web site and associated assets to Learn Technologies Interactive, LLC (LTI). Stein sold 42 Voyager titles to LTI from his Voyager/Criterion company share. The remaining three partners, Aleen Stein, Becker and Turell owned the Criterion Collection company, which has a business partnership with Janus Films and had one with Home Vision Entertainment (HVE) until 2005, when Image Entertainment bought HVE. On November 4, 2013, it was announced that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment would handle distribution.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: In 1986, Charles Benton founded Home Vision Entertainment (HVE), the home-video division of Public Media Inc. (PMI), which he had previously founded in 1968. The HVE company sold, advertised, marketed and distributed Criterion Collection DVDs, and also sold its own HVE brand of DVDs (co-produced with Criterion), including The Merchant Ivory Collection and the Classic Collection, a joint venture between Home Vision Entertainment and Janus Films. The latter enterprise published HVE imprint films, for which Janus Films owned the video rights, but which were unavailable from the Criterion Collection; however, Criterion published the Classic Collection films. In 2005, Image Entertainment bought HVE making it the exclusive distributor of Criterion Collection products until 2013.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: The Criterion Collection began to provide video-on-demand (VOD) in partnership with Mubi (formerly "The Auteurs") in 2008. In February 2011, Criterion began switching its VOD offerings exclusively to Hulu Plus. In November 2016, FilmStruck, a film streaming service from Turner Classic Movies, succeeded Hulu as the exclusive streaming service for the Criterion Collection. Some Criterion films were streamed by Kanopy. On October 26, 2018, Warner Bros. Digital Networks and Turner announced that FilmStruck would shut down on November 29. Criterion stated in a blog post that it was "trying to find ways we can bring our library and original content back to the digital space as soon as possible."


title: The Criterion Collection

text: On November 16, 2018, Criterion announced the launch of the Criterion Channel as a standalone service, wholly owned and operated by the Criterion Collection, in the United States and Canada. Some of the VOD service's offerings are also available through HBO Max, WarnerMedia's streaming platform .


title: The Criterion Collection

text: Criterion also maintains a YouTube channel to market its films. One notable feature is the "Three Reasons" playlist, in which the company provides three reasons that a film is worth watching or has entered the Criterion catalogue. In response, YouTube users offer their own "Three Reasons" to promote nominations. However, no "Three Reasons" video has been released by Criterion since June 30, 2015.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: British film magazine "Sight & Sound" revealed in its April 2016 issue that Criterion would be expanding its releases to the United Kingdom. The first six titles were released on April 18, 2016.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: The Criterion Collection video company pioneered the correct aspect-ratio letterboxing presentation of films, as well as commentary soundtracks, multi-disc sets, special editions and definitive versions. These ideas and the special features introduced by the Criterion Collection have been highly influential, and have become industry-wide standards for premium home video releases.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: With its eighth LaserDisc release, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956), Criterion introduced the letterbox format, which added black bars to the top and bottom of the standard television set in order to preserve the original aspect ratio of the film. Thereafter, Criterion made letterboxing the standard presentation for all its releases of films shot in widescreen aspect ratios.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: The Criterion Collection's second catalog title, "King Kong" (1933), was the debut of the scene-specific audio commentary contained in a separate analog channel of the LaserDisc, in which American film historian Ronald Haver spoke about the production, cast, screenplay, production design and special effects. He also provides commentary on the LaserDisc editions of "Casablanca" (1942), "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" (1941), "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) and "The Wizard of Oz" (1939). Typically, the chapter-indexed commentaries are exclusive to the Criterion releases and their initial DVD reissues; they became collectors' items when the original studios reissued titles previously licensed to Criterion, regardless of whether new commentary tracks were produced.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: The Criterion Collection began in 1984 with the releases of "Citizen Kane" (1941) and "King Kong" (1933) on LaserDisc, the latter's source negatives courtesy of the Library of Congress. The company later became known for pioneering the "special edition" DVD concept containing bonus materials such as trailers, commentaries, documentaries, alternate endings and deleted scenes. The success of these releases established the special-edition version in the DVD business. In 2006, taking advantage of advanced film-transfer and film-restoration technologies, Criterion published higher-quality versions, with bonus materials, of early catalog titles such as "Amarcord" (1973), "Brazil" (1985) and "Seven Samurai" (1954).


title: The Criterion Collection

text: Originally, Criterion released art, genre and mainstream movies on LaserDisc such as "Halloween" (1978), "Ghostbusters" (1984), "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992), "Armageddon" (1998) and "The Rock" (1996). Increasingly, the Criterion Collection has also focused on releasing world cinema, mainstream cinema classics and critically successful obscure films. Using the best available source materials, the company produced technologically improved and cleaner versions, such as those for "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928), "M" (1931), "Children of Paradise" (1945), "The Third Man" (1949), "Seven Samurai" (1954) and "Amarcord" (1973). Almost every title contains film-cleaning and film-restoration essays in the booklets, while some even have featurettes comparing the restored and unrestored images.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: Some previously licensed Criterion Collection titles, such as "The Harder They Come" (1972), are now commercially unavailable as new product, and are only available in resale (used) form. Titles such as "RoboCop" (1987), "Hard Boiled" (1992), "The Killer" (1989) and "Ran" (1985) became unavailable when their publishing licenses expired or when Criterion published improved versions, such as those for "Beauty and the Beast" (1946), "M" (1931), "The Wages of Fear" (1953) and "Seven Samurai" (1954). As of September 2018, 188 of the 954 titles (19%) from the list of Criterion Collection LaserDisc releases have been rereleased.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: Another example is the film "Charade" (1963), which had become a public-domain property for lacking the legally-required copyright notice. Criterion produced a restored edition under license from Universal Pictures for the initial edition and for the later anamorphic widescreen rerelease edition of the film.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: Periodically, Criterion releases material on DVD and Blu-ray disc licensed from the studios with whom the company had previously dealt (such as Universal's and Terry Gilliam's 1985 film "Brazil"); these new releases are generally undertaken on a case-by-case basis.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: In 2022, Criterion released its first Walt Disney Pictures title, Andrew Stanton's "WALL-E". This was not the result of an ongoing deal between Disney and Criterion, but rather licensed as a one-off, with Stanton approaching Criterion and "wanting to be part of the club".


title: The Criterion Collection

text: The Criterion Collection began publishing LaserDiscs on December 1, 1984, with its release of "Citizen Kane", until March 16, 1999, with Michael Bay's "Armageddon". Three of the company's early titles (spines #003–005) were also issued on VHS and Betamax. These were Criterion's only releases on those formats.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: Criterion entered the DVD market in 1998, beginning with "Seven Samurai", spine number 2 ("Grand Illusion", spine number 1, was delayed for a year while restoration was underway on a then-newly-found camera negative.) As with its laserdiscs, Criterion's early DVD editions of widescreen films were presented in the letterbox format, but Criterion did not anamorphically enhance its discs for monitors until mid-1999 with its release of "Insomnia" (1997), catalog number 47.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: Criterion was slow to expand into high-definition releases, partly because of the HD format wars between Blu-ray and HD DVD. Once Blu-ray had emerged as the industry-standard high-definition home-video format, Criterion began to release Blu-ray editions of select films from its collection, beginning with the Blu-ray release of Wong Kar-wai's "Chungking Express" (#453; currently out of print) on December 16, 2008. In late 2013, Criterion announced that with the November release of the "Zatoichi" boxset (spine #679), all future releases would be in dual format (DVD and Blu-ray packaged together) rather than as individual releases. This decision also applied to most upgrade rereleases introduced after November 2013. After customer feedback revealed some reluctance to this approach, "All That Jazz" (#724) became the last chronological spine number released as a dual-format edition, and the decision was reversed to release separate discs for titles beginning in September 2014.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: Despite the emergence of Blu-ray as the industry-standard high-definition format, Janus/Criterion continues to support the DVD format. Not only are all their new Blu-ray releases accompanied by a standard-definition DVD version, but revised and upgraded releases are also released on both formats (barring the brief foray into dual-format releases). Moreover, the company's standalone line of Eclipse releases are currently only made available in the standard DVD format.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: Aside from the core catalog, the company has also released films through its Essential Art House, Eclipse and Merchant Ivory Collection lines, as well as a few releases outside of any product line. Many of these releases have also been collected and sold in various box sets.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: In April 2016 for the first time in its history, Criterion announced it would begin releasing its catalogue outside of the U.S. (earlier international Criterion titles such as the Japanese LaserDisc of "Blade Runner" were licensed to other companies). In partnership with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, releases began to be distributed with the launch of six titles in the U.K. during the month.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: Criterion began publishing titles on Blu-ray Disc in December 2008. Unlike its DVD releases, which are a mixture of NTSC-standard Region 0 (region-free) and Region 1 DVDs, Criterion Collection Blu-ray discs are Region A-locked in North America or Region B-locked in the United Kingdom (though there are exceptions).


title: The Criterion Collection

text: On August 11, 2021, Criterion announced that it would begin publishing titles in Ultra HD Blu-ray format in November 2021. All Criterion Ultra HD Blu-ray releases will include both an Ultra HD Blu-ray copy and a regular Blu-ray copy of a film (with all the special features on the regular Blu-ray), with select releases including Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos. The first such releases were announced on August 16 for a November 21 release: "Citizen Kane" (returning to the collection for the first time since 1992), "Mulholland Drive" and "Menace II Society". The company also plans to release "The Red Shoes", "A Hard Day’s Night" and "The Piano" on Ultra HD Blu-ray disc. The film "Uncut Gems", which was previously planned for Blu-ray and DVD release in October 2021, was delayed until November in order to also give the film an Ultra HD Blu-ray release.


title: The Criterion Collection

text: Eclipse is a line started in 2007 separate from the Criterion Collection. It is described by Criterion as "a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in simple, affordable editions."


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: L'Anse aux Meadows ( Meadows Cove) is an archaeological site, first excavated in the 1960s, of a Norse settlement dating to approximately 1,000 years ago. The site is located on the northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador near St. Anthony.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: With carbon dating estimates between 990–1050 CE, tree-ring analysis dating to the year 1021 and a mean carbon date of 1014 overall, L'Anse aux Meadows is the only undisputed site of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact of Europeans with the Americas outside of Greenland. It is notable as evidence of the Norse presence in North America and for its possible connection with Leif Erikson as mentioned in the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, which were written down in the 13th century. Archaeological evidence found at the site indicates that L’Anse aux Meadows may have served as a base camp for Norse exploration of North America, including regions to the south.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: Spanning of land and sea, the site contains the remains of eight buildings constructed with sod over a wood frame. In excess of 800 Norse objects have been unearthed at the site. Evidence of iron production and bronze, bone and stone artifacts have been identified. The site was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1968 and a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1978. Parks Canada manages the site as outlined under the Parks Canada Agency Act (1998) and the Canada National Parks Act (2000). It is the only confirmed Norse site in or near North America outside of the villages and settlements of Greenland.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: L'Anse aux Meadows is a French-English name which can be translated as "Grassland Bay" (lit. "[the] bay with [the] grasslands"). How the village itself came to be named "L'Anse aux Meadows" is debated. One possibility is that "L'Anse aux Meadows" is a corruption of the French designation ', which means "Jellyfish Cove". A more recent supposition is that the name derives from ""L'Anse à la Médée"" ("Medea" Cove") the name it bears on an 1862 French naval chart. Whether "Medea" or "Medusa", it is possible that the name refers to a French naval vessel. The shift to "Meadows" from ' or "Médée" may have occurred because of folk etymology linking the name to the open landscape around the cove, with many meadows.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: Before the Norse arrived in Newfoundland, there is evidence of occupations by five Indigenous groups at the site of L'Anse aux Meadows, the oldest dated at roughly 6,000 years ago. None were contemporaneous with the Norse occupation. The most prominent of these earlier occupations was by the Dorset people, who occupied the site about 300 years before the Norse. Birgitta Wallace gives radiocarbon date ranges for these groups of c. 4000–1000 BCE for the Maritime Archaic tradition, c. 1000–500 BCE for the Groswater tradition, c. 400–750 CE for the Middle Dorset, c. 800–850 CE for the Cow Head Group and Beaches traditions, and c. 1200–1500 CE for the Little Passage tradition.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: The Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows has been dated to approximately 1,000 CE (carbon dating estimates 990–1050 CE), with a mean carbon date of 1014, an assessment that tallies with the relative dating of artifact and structure types. A 2021 "Nature" study, using radiocarbon analysis of three separate tree ring samples and evidence from the anomaly in atmospheric C concentrations in the year 993, pinpointed 1021 as a date of Norse activity at L'Anse aux Meadows.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: Anthropologist John Steinberg has suggested that the site may have been "occupied at least sporadically for perhaps 20 years". Eleanor Barraclough, a lecturer in medieval history and literature at Durham University, suggests the site was not a permanent settlement, but was instead a temporary boat repair facility. She notes there are no findings of burials, tools, agriculture or animal pens—suggesting the inhabitants abandoned the site in an orderly fashion. According to a 2019 "PNAS" study, there may have been Norse activity in L'Anse aux Meadows for as long as a century.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: There is no way of knowing how many people lived at the site at any given time; archaeological evidence of the dwellings suggests it had the capacity of supporting 30 to 160 people. The entire population of Greenland at the time was about 2,500, meaning that the L'Anse aux Meadows site was less than 10 percent of the Norse settlement on Greenland. As Julian D. Richards notes: "It seems highly unlikely that the Norse had sufficient resources to construct a string of such settlements."


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: Today the area mostly consists of open, grassy lands, but 1000 years ago there were forests that were convenient for boatbuilding, housebuilding and iron extraction. The remains of eight buildings (labeled from A–J) were found. They are believed to have been constructed of sod placed over a wooden frame. Based on associated artifacts, the buildings were identified as dwellings or workshops. The largest dwelling (F) measured and consisted of several rooms. Three small buildings (B, C, G) may have been workshops or living quarters for lower-status crew or slaves. Workshops were identified as an iron smithy (building J) containing a forge and iron slag, a carpentry workshop (building D), which generated wood debris and a specialized boat repair area containing worn rivets.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: Other things found at the site consisted of common everyday Norse items, including a stone oil lamp, a whetstone, a bronze fastening pin, a bone knitting needle and part of a spindle. Stone weights, which were found in building G, may have been part of a loom. The presence of the spindle and needle suggests that women as well as men inhabited the settlement.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: Food remains included butternuts, which are significant because they do not grow naturally north of New Brunswick. Their presence probably indicates the Norse inhabitants traveled farther south to obtain them. There is evidence to suggest that the Norse hunted an array of animals that inhabited the area. These included caribou, wolf, fox, bear, lynx, marten, many types of birds and fish, seal, whale and walrus. This area is no longer rich in game due in large part to the harsh winters. This forces the game to either hibernate or venture south as the wind, deep snow, and sheets of ice cover the area. These losses made the harsh winters very difficult for the Norse people at L'Anse aux Meadows. This lack of game supports archaeologists' beliefs that the site was inhabited by the Norse for a relatively short time.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: In 1960, the archaeological remains of Norse buildings were discovered in Newfoundland by the Norwegian husband-wife team of explorer Helge Ingstad and archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad. Based on the idea that the Old Norse name "Vinland", mentioned in the "Icelandic Sagas", meant "wine-land", historians had long speculated that the region contained wild grapes. Because of this, the common hypothesis before the Ingstads' theories was that the Vinland region existed somewhere south of the northern Massachusetts coast, because that is roughly as far north as grapes grow naturally. This is a false assumption. Wild grapes have grown and still grow along the coast of New Brunswick and in the St. Lawrence River valley of Quebec. The archaeological excavation at L'Anse aux Meadows was conducted from 1960 to 1968 by an international team led by Anne Stine Ingstad.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: The Ingstads doubted this hypothesis, saying "that the name Vinland probably means land of meadows...and includes a peninsula." This speculation was based on the belief that the Norse would not have been comfortable settling in areas along the American Atlantic coast. This dichotomy between the two views could have possibly been due to the two historic ways in which the first vowel sound of "Vinland" could be pronounced. The discovery of butternuts in the Norse stratum of the bog on the site by Parks Canada archaeologists implies that the Norse ventured at least as far as the coast of New Brunswick, where butternuts grow (and have grown for centuries) alongside wild grapes. The Norse thus would have had contact with the grapes of the sagas.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: In 1960, George Decker, a citizen of the small fishing hamlet of L'Anse aux Meadows, led Helge Ingstad to a group of mounds near the village that the locals called the "old Indian camp". These mounds covered with grass looked like the remains of houses. Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad carried out seven archaeological excavations there from 1961 to 1968. They investigated the remains of eight buildings and the remains of perhaps a ninth. They determined that the site was of Norse origin because of definitive similarities between the characteristics of structures and artifacts found at the site compared to sites in Greenland and Iceland from around 1000 CE.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: L'Anse aux Meadows is the only confirmed Norse site in North America outside of Greenland. It represents the farthest-known extent of European exploration and settlement of the New World before the voyages of Christopher Columbus almost 500 years later. Historians have speculated that there were other Norse sites, or at least Norse-Native American trade contacts, in the Canadian Arctic. In 2012, possible Norse outposts were identified in Nanook at Tanfield Valley on Baffin Island, as well as Nunguvik, Willows Island and the Avayalik Islands. Point Rosee, in southwestern Newfoundland, shown by National Geographic and the BBC as a possible Norse site, was excavated in 2015 and 2016, without any evidence of a Norse presence being found.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: In November 1968, the Government of Canada named the archaeological site a National Historic Site of Canada. The site was also named a World Heritage Site in 1978 by UNESCO. After L'Anse aux Meadows was named a national historic site, the area, and its related tourist programs, have been managed by Parks Canada. After the first excavation was completed, two more excavations of the site were ordered by Parks Canada. The excavations fell under the direction of Bengt Schonbach from 1973 to 1975 and Birgitta Wallace, in 1976. Following each period of excavation, the site was reburied to protect and conserve the cultural resources.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: The remains of seven Norse buildings are on display at the national historic site. North of the Norse remains are reconstructed buildings, built in the late 20th century, as a part of an interpretive display for the national historic site. The remains of an aboriginal hunting camp are also located at the site, southwest of the Norse remains. Other amenities at the site includes picnic areas, and a visitor centre.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: Adam of Bremen, a German cleric, was the first European to mention Vinland. In a text he composed around 1073, he wrote that


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: This excerpt is from a history Adam composed of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen who held ecclesiastical authority over Scandinavia (the original home of the Norse people) at the time.


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: Norse sagas are written versions of older oral traditions. Two Icelandic sagas, commonly called the "Saga of the Greenlanders" and the "Saga of Erik the Red", describe the experiences of Norse Greenlanders who discovered and attempted to settle land to the west of Greenland, which they called Vinland. The sagas suggest that the Vinland settlement failed because of conflicts within the Norse community, as well as between the Norse and the native people they encountered, whom they called the "Skræling".


title: L'Anse aux Meadows

text: The L'Anse aux Meadows site served as an exploration base and winter camp for expeditions heading southward into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The settlements of Vinland mentioned in these two sagas, Leifsbudir (Leif Ericson) and Hóp (Norse Greenlanders), have both been claimed to be the L'Anse aux Meadows site.


title: Unity Technologies

text: Unity Software Inc. (doing business as Unity Technologies) is a video game software development company based in San Francisco. It was founded in Denmark in 2004 as Over the Edge Entertainment (OTEE) and changed its name in 2007. Unity Technologies is best known for the development of Unity, a licensed game engine used to create video games and other applications.


title: Unity Technologies

text: Unity Technologies was founded as Over the Edge Entertainment (OTEE) in Copenhagen in 2004 by David Helgason (CEO), Nicholas Francis (CCO), and Joachim Ante (CTO). Over the Edge released its first game, "GooBall", in 2005. The game failed commercially, but the three founders saw value in the game development tools that they had created to simplify game development, and so they shifted the company's focus to create an engine for other developers.


title: Unity Technologies

text: The company sought to "democratize" game development and make development of 2D and 3D interactive content more accessible. Unity was named the runner-up for Best Use of Mac OS X Graphics at the 2006 Apple Design Awards. The company grew with the 2007 release of the iPhone, as Unity Technologies produced one of the first engines supporting the platform in full. Because the games industry was focused on console games when the iPhone and App Store were released, Unity was positioned to support developers looking to create mobile games. Its dominance on the iPhone was largely uncontested for a couple of years. In 2007, Over the Edge changed its name to Unity Technologies.


title: Unity Technologies

text: The technology was developed for different platforms. By 2018, Unity was used to make games and other experiences for more than 25 platforms, including mobile, desktop, consoles, and virtual reality. Unity games can also be deployed on the Web.


title: Unity Technologies

text: The Unity Asset Store launched in November 2010 as an online marketplace for Unity users to sell project assets (artwork, code systems, audio, etc.) to each other.


title: Unity Technologies

text: In April 2012, Unity reportedly had 1 million registered developers, 300,000 of whom used Unity on a monthly basis. In May of the same year, a survey by "Game Developer" revealed that approximately 53% of mobile game developers were using Unity. By 2016, the company reported more than 5.5 million registered users. Part of Unity's appeal is that it allows people who lack the technical knowledge to program games from scratch to create games and other simulations.


title: Unity Technologies

text: Facebook integrated a software development kit for games using the Unity game engine in 2013. The kit featured tools that allowed tracking advertising campaigns and deep linking, where users were directly linked from social media posts to specific portions within games, and in-game-image sharing.


title: Unity Technologies

text: Unity acquired Applifier, a Helsinki-based mobile service provider, in March 2014. Applifier's game replay sharing and community service was initially called Everyplay, and became known as Unity Everyplay. The acquisition also meant that Applifier's mobile video ad network, GameAds, became Unity Ads. Two more acquisitions followed later in 2014: Playnomics, a data analysis platform for developers (now Unity Analytics), and Tsugi, whose continuous integration service became known as Unity Cloud Build.


title: Unity Technologies

text: In October 2014, Helgason announced in a blog post that he would be stepping down as CEO with John Riccitiello, the former CEO of game company Electronic Arts, replacing him. Helgason remained with the company as executive vice-president.


title: Unity Technologies

text: Software developer Niantic released "Pokémon Go", which was built using Unity engine, in 2016. Following the success of "Pokémon Go", Unity Technologies held several rounds of funding that increased the company's valuation: In July 2016, a $181 million round of funding valued the company at approximately $1.5 billion; in May 2017, the company raised $400 million that valued the company at $2.8 billion; and in 2018 Unity's CEO confirmed a $145 million round that valued the company at approximately $3 billion. Also in 2016, Facebook developed a new PC gaming platform with Unity. In 2017, Unity Technologies acquired Multiplay, a business that offers multiplayer server game hosting, from retailer Game for £19 million.


title: Unity Technologies

text: Unity Technologies released the Unity 2017 version of its platform in 2017. Unity worked with Google on ARCore in 2017 to develop augmented reality tools for Android devices and apps. The following year, Unity Technologies worked with Google Cloud to offer services for online game developers and Alphabet Inc. subsidiary DeepMind to develop virtual world artificial intelligence. The Unity platform is used to help machines through reinforced learning. According to "Fast Company", DeepMind uses Unity software to train algorithms in "physics-realistic environments", where a computer will continually try to achieve a goal through trial and error.


title: Unity Technologies

text: The use of Unity Technologies software expanded beyond games in the 2010s, including film and television and automotive. For the automotive industry, carmakers use Unity's virtual reality platform for design and virtual world car testing simulations. In October 2018, Unity Technologies acquired Digital Monarch Media, a Canadian virtual cinematography company.


title: Unity Technologies

text: Unity Technologies created the Unity Icon Collective in November 2018. The team creates assets for sale in the Unity Asset Store for PC and consoles. The assets—characters, environments, art, and animation—can be used in high-quality games; the move was seen as an attempt to compete with Unity's rivals, such as Epic Games' Unreal Engine.


title: Unity Technologies

text: The company acquired Vivox, a cross-platform voice and text chat provider based in Framingham, Massachusetts, in January 2019. At an acquisition price of $123.4 million, the company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Unity Technologies and operates independently. Vivox's technology is used in "Fortnite", "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds", and "League of Legends", among others. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In May 2019, the company confirmed a $150 million Series E funding round that increased its valuation to $6 billion. In July that year, it announced that together with D1 Capital Partners, CPP Investment Board, Light Street Capital, Sequoia Capital and Silver Lake Partners, it would fund a $525 million tender to allow Unity's common shareholders to sell their shares in the company. Unity Technologies additionally purchased game analytics company deltaDNA in September 2019, which was later reported at a value of $53.1 million. The company continued their acquisitions by buying live game management platform ChilliConnect in October 2019, and 3D application streaming service Furioos creator Obvioos in November 2019. That same year, Unity paid $48.8 million to acquire Artomatix, a company that develops an AI-assisted material creation tool called ArtEngine. Despite growing revenues of $541.8 million, Unity also posted growing losses of $163.2 million.


title: Unity Technologies

text: The company's IPO filing revealed that they reported losses of over $162.3 million in 2019, and have consistently lost money since its founding in 2004. Despite the losses, the company has consistently grown in terms of revenue and employee numbers.


title: Unity Technologies

text: In June 2020, Unity announced that they had partnered with Apple to update the Unity Engine to run on Apple silicon-equipped Macs with the 2020.2 release, allowing game developers to update their games to support the new hardware platform. An Apple silicon-ported version of the Unity Editor was demoed during the WWDC 2020 Platforms State of the Union event. On 17 August of that year, Unity stated that it had acquired Codice Software, who make the distributed version control system Plastic SCM. That same year, Unity acquired Finger Food Advanced Technology Group for $46.8 million.