Human Smoke

[Dave Monroe]

Thanks!

You may also have cited the Sloterdijk way back when, albeit in German.

On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 5:51 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> 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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