tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3855223901782590860.post5859289287114009195..comments2024-02-19T05:12:30.844-05:00Comments on Oh Boym: The Dark Sidecbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03342342242345926624noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3855223901782590860.post-91295894035285059962012-06-11T18:37:40.410-04:002012-06-11T18:37:40.410-04:00A wonderful and important entry with more than a f...A wonderful and important entry with more than a few intriguing questions. Who would admit to designing and manufacturing the instruments and tools use describe here? Perhaps Dr. Guillotin on one end of the spectrum the idealist, or Dr. Mengele, the sadist, on the other. Members of a priesthood of death who served their their dark gods.<br /><br />The peripheral instruments of war do deserve more attention, if for no other reason than they serve their purpose, quietly and as you state, "with technical and functional elegance." <br /><br />As to why people "do this to each other? Well, my friend, the ultimate answer is impossible to ascertain. One can guess with confident that no sooner did men/women discover that flesh was weak, in every sense of the word, devises were improvised, devised and continually improved with the intent of of creating the perfect means to inflict pain and death. It is no accident that it was Freud who said, "The first civilized man was the one to hurl an insult instead of a stone." (If this is not the actual quote, it captures its intent.)<br /><br />Apropos of diabolical design, I'll offer this description from an old THE NEW YORKER ARTICLE: <br />“... the fact [is] that the death camp at Auschwitz was built on a provisional basis. ‘Unlike most monuments in the world, Auschwitz was never intended to last,’ Bohdan Rymaszewski, of the Warsaw Culture Ministry, says. ‘The Germans built the camp with the intention of exterminating an entire race and then destroying all the evidence of this deed. Everything was poorly made—the barracks, the crematoriums, the paper used for documents. It was difficult to preserve something that was made to vanish.’”<br /><br />Quite terrible. All too human.RWordplayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13987980380490858573noreply@blogger.com