Human Smoke

[Dave Monroe]

Terror from the Air
By Peter Sloterdijk
Translated by  Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran

Overview

According to Peter Sloterdijk, the twentieth century started on a
specific day and place: April 22, 1915, at Ypres in Northern France.
That day, the German army used a chlorine gas meant to exterminate
indiscriminately. Until then, war, as described by Clausewitz and
practiced by Napoleon, involved attacking the adversary's vital
function first. Using poison gas signaled the passage from classical
war to terrorism. This terror from the air inaugurated an era in which
the main idea was no longer to target the enemy's body, but their
environment. From then on, what would be attacked in wartime as well
as in peacetime would be the very conditions necessary for life.

This kind of terrorism became the matrix of modern and postmodern war,
from World War I's toxic gas to the Nazi Zyklon B used in Auschwitz,
from the bombing of Dresden to the attack on the World Trade Center.
Sloterdijk goes on to describe the offensive of modern aesthetics,
aesthetic terrorism from Surrealism to Malevich—an "atmo-terrorism" in
the arts that parallels the assault on environment that had originated
in warfare.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/terror-air

The Unquiet Sky

https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1507&msg=188433



On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 5:30 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> "AN INTELLIGENCE OFFICER published a book called The War in the Air. The
> officer, David Garnett, was also a novelist and a publisher---he was part of
> the Bloomsbury group. Now, however, he was doing war work.
>    Garnett wasn't, he said, an advocate of terror bombing---not because it's
> wrong but because England didn't have enough airplanes to terror-bomb
> properly. 'For bombing to be effective against civilians it must inspire
> abject terror and despair,' Garnett wrote.
>
>   I can conceive that in 1943, when Britain has achieved a tremendous air
> superiority, the ruthless bombing of the war-weary population in Germany on
> a far more gigantic scale than has been experienced by any British city may
> well be the most effective way to bring about a German revolution. By
> butchering the German population indiscriminately it might be possible to
> goad them into a desperate rising in which every member of the Nazi party
> would have his throat cut.
>
> Garnett said that he'd had the pleasure of examining a Boeing Flying
> Fortress: 'We need two or three thousand such aircraft,' he said. It was
> September 1941." (p. 388)
>
> A very recommendable read!
>
>
> On 11.08.2015 09:22, Dave Monroe wrote:
>
> Human Smoke
> The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
> By Nicholson Baker
>
> [...]
>
> Human Smoke delivers a closely textured, deeply moving indictment of
> the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and '40s.
> Incorporating meticulous research and well-documented
> sources—including newspaper and magazine articles, radio speeches,
> memoirs, and diaries—the book juxtaposes hundreds of interrelated
> moments of decision, brutality, suffering, and mercy. Vivid glimpses
> of political leaders and their dissenters illuminate and examine the
> gradual, horrifying advance toward overt global war and Holocaust.
>
> [...]
>
> http://books.simonandschuster.com/Human-Smoke/Nicholson-Baker/9781416572466
>
> Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
> is a 2008 book by Nicholson Baker about World War II. The book
> questions the commonly held belief that the Allies wanted to avoid the
> war at all costs but were forced into action by Hitler's unrelenting
> crusade. It consists largely of official government transcripts,
> newspaper articles and other documents from the time with Baker
> interjecting commentary only occasionally. Baker cites documents that
> suggest that the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom
> were provoking Germany and Japan into war and that the leaders of
> those two nations had ulterior motives for participating. Baker
> dedicates the book to American and British pacifists of the time who,
> in the book's epilogue, he states had it right all along: “They
> failed, but they were right.”
>
> [...]
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Smoke
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
>
>
>
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l