Human Smoke

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1504&msg=187033&sort=date

On 11.08.2015 12:42, Dave Monroe wrote:
> 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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