Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

mnaz wrote:after centuries of hardening psychosis, humankind made it official... we must institutionalize darkness. we must forever ignore and pervert the lessons contained in self-inflicted mass suffering, hijack science, steal our own sustaining energy, murder peacemakers in cold blood and make them into barbaric, honorable religions-- never let them rest. not a moment's rest. it was a megaton proverb to piss on. seems the beginning of the end. and i was born so neatly into its manic, filthy wake that i hardly noticed...

Human Smoke

A Debunker on the Road to World War II

He added: “Over and over again I would take out the five most important books on X subject, and then I’d go back to The New York Times, and by God, the story that was written the day after was by far the best source. Those reporters were writing with everything in the right perspective. Sometimes I think historians are a little like sauté chefs: they cook everything up and soften the edges.”



A Debunker on the Road to World War II

To research his new book, “Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization,” which comes out next week from Simon & Schuster, Mr. Baker read old newspapers online and on microfilm, and he also borrowed hundreds of books from the library at the University of New Hampshire

“I came to the Second World War with a typically inadequate American education.” Mr. Baker said, “and I was surprised to discover that Churchill had this crazy, late-night side. He was obviously thrilled to be in the midst of this escalating war. This is a man who wanted Europe to starve — he wanted to starve it into a state of revolt.”

He added: “I’ve always had pacifist leanings, and so one of the things I wanted to learn was how do you react to the Second World War if you’re a pacifist. That war is always held up as the great counterexample, the one that was justified. And I got hungrier and hungrier to answer the question: Did the Allies’ response to Hitler really help anyone who needed help? One of the things I discovered, for example, was that the most impressive opponents of the war were also the people most actively arguing that we had to help the refugees. There was a complete overlap.”

Talking about starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto during the British blockade, Mr. Baker became so worked up that he had to pause, take off his rimless glasses and rub his eyes, and then he went on: “What are you going to do when Europe is threatened by Hitler, this paranoid, dangerous person? My feelings about the war change every day. But I also feel that there is a way of looking at the war and the Holocaust that is truer and sadder and stranger than the received version.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/books ... ted=1&_r=1

Word makers of war


One hour after the Dance of Death

I lay in the abyss, where twisting squeezing
The lowest form of life pushed itself peristaltically.
Where slippery and slimy worm and eel entwined,
I was a worm myself, overwhelmed with exhaustion.