Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
Just finished Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
A profoundly disturbing book, nuanced and very educational as to the sociology of killing and genocide.
For those working in conflict prevention and stabilisation I would highly recommend this book as it gives very good pointers as to the ingredients required for mass murder in terms of sociology (dehumanisation, legitimisation are key) as well as the impact on individuals and the mechanics of sustainable genocide.
For commanders and especially junior commanders it would be a good book to challenge their self-belief that they and their men would never knowingly do wrong. It is very easy to say that we are the good guys and would never do such things, but history is littered with examples of ordinary men doing unspeakable things. The mechanics of how Reserve Police Battalion 101 was co-opted into genocide, the break down of the unit into Active, Participatory and Inactive members, their increasing brutalisation and the impact of the leadership element is both sobering and informative.
Ist auf der Erde ewig dir nichts recht?
A book about the Ahnenerbe.
The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust by Heather Pringle.
Ahnenerbe - wikipedia
...
DER HERR:
Hast du mir weiter nichts zu sagen?
Kommst du nur immer anzuklagen?
Ist auf der Erde ewig dir nichts recht?
MEPHISTOPHELES:
Nein Herr! ich find es dort, wie immer, herzlich schlecht.
Die Menschen dauern mich in ihren Jammertagen,
Ich mag sogar die armen selbst nicht plagen.
Faust, The Prologue
the past is a foreign country
Four books that seemed to be common fixtures on expat shelves in mid-seventies Singapore.
War of the Running Dogs by Noel Barber
Syonan, My Story by Mamoru Shinozaki
The Scourge of the Swastika by Lord Russell of Liverpool
The Knights of Bushido by Lord Russell of Liverpool
Quote:
...at the annual Speech Day of Liverpool College on 23 November (1961), Lord Russell of Liverpool lectured the boys on the three things he most disliked in young men: Teddy boys, pop singers and beatniks, but especially pop singers 'because they can cash in to the tune of about 200 pounds a week for strumming a guitar and looking as though they had Saint Vitus' dance.'
The Beatles - All These Years
going down into the garden of nuts
The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
Occult America: White House Seances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz
"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
the ceremony of innocence
A Dangerous Friend by Ward Just
Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia by Arnold R. Isaacs
"In each dream the locality was totally new to me, and I had an entirely fresh detachment." E.D. Swinton, The Defence of Duffer's Drift
British Muslims: who are they, what do they think?
Innes Bowen after seven years research and writing has written a short, exceptional book 'Medina in Birmingham Najaf in Brent Inside British Islam':http://www.amazon.co.uk/Medina-Birmi...ds=innes+bowen
Perhaps there is an American equivalent? Here is my review.
This 230 page book is simply an exceptionally useful guide to who British Muslims are and what they think (about their religion). They are a minority, which is growing, spreading out of the inner cities, are increasingly found in the professions and can often have differences with the rest of us – they need to be understood better. So read this book!
Loyalty to the nation, not a cricket team, regularly features in public discussions. In a 2011 survey by Demos they showed that Muslims were more patriotic than other Britons (83 per cent said they were proud to be British as opposed to 79 per cent of the general population).
The vast majority of urban English British Muslims have been here for at least fifty years, traditionally supporting the Labour Party. Alongside smaller groups like the (now growing rapidly) Somali and Yemeni for far longer - often in port cities. Not all British Muslims have an overseas origin, there are growing numbers of converts, black youths in London and white English academics – all of them have a place in the book.
Rightly the book concentrates on Muslims of South Asian origin (60% of all British Muslims). The book helps to explain that often their faith is expressed via mosques and community organisations that are sectarian, with strong South Asian / Saudi Arabian links. One consequence is that these groups produce very conservative clerics – not the externally desired British “moderate” ones.
In the media British Muslims appear to come in from small vocal minorities. What better example than the columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown; she is an Ismaili, one of fifty thousand. Or the Muslim Brotherhood whose main influence is in London's Arab community and control just seven mosques out of over sixteen hundred. Then there are the angry, shouting “radicals”.
One hopes that those in national and local government, the politicians and bureaucrats, read this book too. It should be on the desk of those responding to British Muslims as individuals and communities, such as community workers and the police.
Contrary to Amazon.com the book has been published.
'Uncle Bill' Slim: the authorised biography
Now available in paperback I read the hardback edition of Russell Miller's 'Uncle Bill: The Authorised Biography of Field Marshal Viscount Slim', thankfully I'd not purchased the tome.
It is a long time since I read another biography and his own book. Being 'The Authorised Biography' I hoped it would cast new light on Britain's best modern general.
Sadly there is not a single campaign map, not even of the Burma-Indian front. Nor a table of organisation for the Fourteenth Army, I suppose the author and editor forgot.
Yes the use of Bill Slim's letters to his children added value and the author has collected new material. Then one reads that the Japanese used Stuka divebombers! Some characters appear before their entry to the narrative, Wingate in particular, which would be confusing to a reader not aware of them.
UK Link:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Uncle-Bill-A...+viscount+slim
US link:http://www.amazon.com/Uncle-Bill-Aut...+viscount+slim
girls just want to have fun
Warfare and the Third World by Robert E. Harkavy and Stephanie G. Neuman.
The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone.
"Confusion will be my epitaph
As I crawl a cracked and broken path
If we make it we can all sit back and laugh,"
King Crimson, Epitaph
WW2 Crimean campaign: Italians fighting?
Firn replied:
Quote:
I'm not sure about the Crimea one...
When I visited Sevastapol our guides pointed out an Italian war memorial, built recently after the USSR fell - that is what I relied upon.
Incidentally the official German war cemetery organisation pulled out when they realised their negoitations were not with the local government, but the local mafia.:wry: There was only a wooden marker on a German mass grave.
I shall see if my memory can be confirmed by some research.;)
NYRB essay on "Broken Windows" philosophy in NYC
I can typically see the seams when writers whose subject matter expertise is the profession of writing tackle a topic, but Michael Greenberg’s essay “‘Broken Windows’ and the New York Police” in the latest New York Review of Books doesn’t have a shreds and patches feel to it. The prose is fluid and informative, and the essay comes off to me as fair to all involved. Those involved may feel differently, obviously. :D
From the essay:
Quote:
Currently, in New York, possession of less than twenty-five grams is not a crime unless you are caught lighting up in public or, in the language of the law, the drug is “open to public view.” A beat cop on foot patrol, instructed to enact the policy, may approach a person he deems to be suspicious. He orders the suspect to empty the contents of his pockets, which may contain a couple of grams of pot. The suspect has now publicly displayed the drug and is arrested according to the letter of the law. Black and Hispanic men make up 86 percent of these busts.
[…]
I saw for myself some of the effects of these low-level arrests during an unplanned visit I made, in July 2013, to the “Tombs”—the windowless holding pens in the basement of the 100 Centre Street courthouse in Manhattan. I counted four white men out of hundreds of prisoners who were waiting to be arraigned. One was there for allegedly slugging his girlfriend, another for buying cocaine in an upscale night club. The other two were accused of driving while intoxicated. (I was one of the latter; the charges against me were eventually dismissed.)
This was a large summer weekend crowd, men tightly crammed in the cells, agitating for a few inches of bench space. A neatly dressed seventeen-year-old boy had staked out a spot on the floor, where he sat with his head between his knees in what appeared to be a state of silent despair. The single overflowing toilet that served the thirty or forty men in the cell seemed to bring him close to tears.
The boy had made the mistake of asking a rider who was exiting a subway station to swipe him through with her MetroCard. “I was thirty-three cents short for a single fare,” he told me. He neither jumped the turnstile nor harassed the woman, who obligingly swiped him through. A policeman witnessed the exchange, arrested the boy, and let the woman off with a stern warning, though what law she had broken is unclear. The policeman now had cause to search the kid and found the remnants of a joint in his pocket—crumbs of pot. Though he had no prior arrests, he was now facing two charges: marijuana possession and theft of services, a class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. He wouldn’t do time, most likely, beyond his current incarceration, but he feared, with good reason, that the financial aid a college in Pennsylvania had granted him for his freshman year would be rescinded.
And:
Quote:
Sometimes, police will use the pretext of minor infractions, such as truancy or riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, to lock up crew members on the day of a planned shoot-out—a selective employment of the broken windows tactic that may actually save kids’ lives. Many of these cops are trained in community relations. “I need help, and if the cops are the ones giving it, that’s fine by me,” a mother in the Albany Houses in Brooklyn told me.
It isn’t rare for parents to plead with police to take their children into custody, in order to protect them. In households with domestic abuse, a crime that has not decreased in recent years, police repeatedly check in, paying follow-up visits after an arrest or a complaint, to see how the family is getting on.
Ray Kelly, who started the Crew Cut initiative toward the end of his tenure as commissioner, said, “If I had to point to one reason why the murders and shootings are down, it is this program. And I can tell you that there is a lot of positive feedback from cops.” The remark is as close as he has come, to my knowledge, to questioning the relative effectiveness of stop and frisk, whose main purpose was to confiscate guns; it’s also an indirect acknowledgment of the widespread dissatisfaction among the NYPD’s rank and file during the Bloomberg and Kelly years. Beat cops particularly disliked stop and frisk, and sometimes would write up “ghost 250s”—fake stop-and-frisk reports with no names—in order to meet quotas.
The digital version is free for all at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arch...w-york-police/.
everybody wants to rule the world
to your scattered bodies go
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
The Apocalypse Door by James D. MacDonald
"The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck." - Paul Virilio
...
David St. Hubbins: "It's such a fine line between stupid, and uh..."
Derek Smalls: "...and clever." - Spinal Tap