One reading this week stood out in particular - and rightly so. Terence Des Pres' graphic detailing and chronicling of the atrocities that characterized the Nazi death camps was simply disturbing. I am by no means a squeamish person. I've been through the military and I've seen a lot relative to most. But with every line I read, I just shook my head in disgust. It permeated my being... the pity for the prisoners... the sheer audacity and incredulity of it all... questions like 'How could people even get that stage of cruelty and evil' pervaded my thoughts.
From the onset of the title I was a little perturbed and a torrent of unease struck me - 'Excremental attack' - for I was not sure what to expect. And what was delivered I did not anticipate. The atrocities and so the horrid recollections actually revolved around human excrement and that was sufficient to stir the appetite of revulsion in me. What was worse however, was the overarching notion that it was humans who subjugated other humans to these conditions and treatment. Not some alien race bereft of compassion, but humans. Humans coercing fellow humans to consume each others' excrement, to wade in it, to die in it - and all the while enforcing such unimaginable and 'deliberate policy' with conviction and enthusiasm. As he emphatically states:
"The fact is that prisoners were systematically subject to filth.They were the deliberate target of excremental assault."
I was most enlightened to the concept of power as an pernicious and sinister concept that consumes - a corollary of which is the birth of 'a special kind of evil'. Also, the idea that for such men of 'pathological rage', the mere act of killing someone is not enough for something in the victim has escaped the killer's grasp. Hence, everything in a person, defined as a person's 'dignity'.
In addition, the whole concept of 'dehumanizing' the inmates so that those who carried out the policies could continue doing so was a disturbing realization to me. Apparently, killing someone who can't even look you in the eye in that very moment of life/death is easier.. especially so if that person is covered in excrement and is simply of an inhuman form. Lastly, everyone being covered in excrement meant it was hard to for the prisoners to develop any form of solidarity as their morale was too low and all they saw in each other was themselves...inferior, inhuman, and reviling to each other.
Overall, astonishingly disturbing and disturbingly astonishing.
From the onset of the title I was a little perturbed and a torrent of unease struck me - 'Excremental attack' - for I was not sure what to expect. And what was delivered I did not anticipate. The atrocities and so the horrid recollections actually revolved around human excrement and that was sufficient to stir the appetite of revulsion in me. What was worse however, was the overarching notion that it was humans who subjugated other humans to these conditions and treatment. Not some alien race bereft of compassion, but humans. Humans coercing fellow humans to consume each others' excrement, to wade in it, to die in it - and all the while enforcing such unimaginable and 'deliberate policy' with conviction and enthusiasm. As he emphatically states:
"The fact is that prisoners were systematically subject to filth.They were the deliberate target of excremental assault."
I was most enlightened to the concept of power as an pernicious and sinister concept that consumes - a corollary of which is the birth of 'a special kind of evil'. Also, the idea that for such men of 'pathological rage', the mere act of killing someone is not enough for something in the victim has escaped the killer's grasp. Hence, everything in a person, defined as a person's 'dignity'.
In addition, the whole concept of 'dehumanizing' the inmates so that those who carried out the policies could continue doing so was a disturbing realization to me. Apparently, killing someone who can't even look you in the eye in that very moment of life/death is easier.. especially so if that person is covered in excrement and is simply of an inhuman form. Lastly, everyone being covered in excrement meant it was hard to for the prisoners to develop any form of solidarity as their morale was too low and all they saw in each other was themselves...inferior, inhuman, and reviling to each other.
Overall, astonishingly disturbing and disturbingly astonishing.
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