Guilty as chargedGuilty as charged
“It should be clear—plain to any person—open to any eye—that historical chronicles are chronologies of crime, and that any recital of the past constitutes an indictment.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
Author: Tetman Callis
Flavor-of-the-month clubFlavor-of-the-month club
“O yes, O yes, O yes, O yes, I am aware, O how I know, that there are those who write like tenors, stock their books as though each were a fish pond, dry goods, hardware, or a pantry; who jerry-build, compose sentences like tangled spaghetti, piss through their pens and otherwise relieve themselves, play at poetry as if they were still dressing dolls, order history as though it were an endless bill of lading; but there were genuine bookmen once: Burton, Montaigne, Rabelais and other list-makers, Sir Thomas Browne and Hobbes, in the days when a book was not just a signal like a whiff of smoke from a movie Indian or a carton of cold crumb-covered carryout chicken, but a blood-filled body in the world, a mind in motion like a cannonball.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
What’s the price on that?What’s the price on that?
“Everywhere nothing now but a revocation of the muse. Cancel Clio, cross out sweet Calliope, for history’s been buggered by ideology, and farts its facts in an odorous cloud, while poets have no breath whatever, are in another business presently, where Parnassus is a pastry, and produce their poems promptly on request like short-order cooks shake forth a batch of fries. Mark out Melpomene. The lines of the anonymous are nothing like the lives of the saints; a celebrity is but a draft from his fans; crooks establish dynasties on stolen dimes.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
And this is why the Internet is freeAnd this is why the Internet is free
“Of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves, not merely protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and papers, from the inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the enjoyment of this right, all others would lose half their value.” – Justice Field, In re Pacific Railway Commission, 32 Fed. 241
Busybodies on the government payrollBusybodies on the government payroll
“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” – Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmsted v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928)
Catch it if you canCatch it if you can
“The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” – Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmsted v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928)
To be so clean againTo be so clean again
“We lie with the Fates from our first conception; for it is said—and truly too—that the flesh is built up over the bones at birth by the caresses of those star-guarding harlots whose pawed passage clings there like a cloth, just as the soul in our life is the silted delta of the senses, their accumulated fat; and it is Clotho whose touch becomes our tissue, and Atropos who trims it to the shape we’ll take, and Lachesis who then stitches it about us like a shroud; so when we go to ground, as eventually we must, we lose our lusts with our linens, arising on the last day as clean and shriven as the one on which we were begot.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
It might not prove the joist we sought to hammerIt might not prove the joist we sought to hammer
“We live in a world of whirling air just as Anaximenes concluded, a world of whiffs, puffs, breaths, zephyrs, breezes, hurricanes, monsoons, and mistrals; and if they all died away suddenly, and we were Sargasso’d in a sea of circumstance, then one small draft through a winter window might drive us at our destiny like a nail.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
Fancy a fancy-eating treeFancy a fancy-eating tree
“A flat and wooden style, words nailed like shingles to the page, the earnest straightforward bite of the spike, is the one which suits sincerity; sincerity cannot gambol, cannot play, cannot hedge its bets, forswear a wager, bear to lose; sincerity is tidy; it shits in a paper sack to pretend it’s innocent of food; it cannot quote its masters like Montaigne, or fly its fancy even in a tree, or pun upon a wholesome opportunity, draw up lists like Burton, burst at all its seams; sincerity makes every day dull Sunday, does lump sums, keeps tabs, lies through its honesty like a Bible-beater’s pious threats and Great Good News.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
To be young and upright againTo be young and upright again
“Classicists cannot soil themselves with simple-minded seeing the way empirics do: empirics are too dewy, eager, brash, young, innocent, naive. No. And not because experience couldn’t bring them to wisdom better than the Greeks, either, but because experience is broad and muddy like the Ganges, with the filthy and the holy intermixed in every wash; because it is itself the puzzle and the surd; because it teaches primarily through pain, defeat, disappointment, loss; and these leave a groveler inside the heart; to preside in the spirit, they appoint a hanging judge; and create a resentful cripple in the mind, bent to one side in the continuous clutch of its truth.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
And reparations cannot be paidAnd reparations cannot be paid
“Neither guilt nor innocence are ontological elements in history; they are merely ideological factors to which a skillful propaganda can seem to lend a causal force, and in that fashion furnish others—in disguise of their greed as it may be, their terror sometimes, pride possibly, remorse even, or, more often, surly resentment—a superficially plausible apologia for tomorrow’s acts of robbery or cowardice, revenge, rape, or other criminalities already under way; because the past cannot promise its future the way a premise stands in line with a ticket good for its conclusion (the past is never a justification, only a poor excuse; it confers no rights, and rights no wrongs; it is even more heartless than Hitler).” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
NoNo
“Is writing to yourself a healthier insanity than talking to yourself?” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
Capital preservationCapital preservation
“The Reichskommissariat Ukraine had certain features in common with Nazi concentration camps such as Dachau: the pervasive terror; the obligation to witness public beatings or executions; the happy music during sad occasions; and the frequency with which captors observed their subjects with disgust or pretended not to see them at all. It is not surprising that the natives themselves often described their situation as one of captivity (plen) or slavery (rabstvo). ‘We are like slaves,’ wrote one woman in her diary. ‘Often the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes to mind. Once we shed tears over those Negroes; now obviously we ourselves are experiencing the same thing.’ But the Reichskommissariat was far worse than a slaveholding society. In the vast majority of past societies for which reliable data are available, slaves were treated with some consideration. Slaveholders and other nonslaves realized that in the treatment of slaves, incentives made more sense than punishment. Slaves were supposed to be used as servants—not to be disabled, let alone killed.” – Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair
Murderous tyrannies allMurderous tyrannies all
“Western Volhynia, less than thirty thousand square kilometers, inhabited by 1.5 million people, including 250,000 Poles, experienced in 1943 mass killings of Poles and a Polish-Ukrainian war. At the very least 15,000, and possibly many thousands more, Polish men, women, and children died at the hands of Ukrainian partisans and villagers in one of the most comprehensive cases of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in wartime eastern Europe. Many Poles survived only because they fled across the Buh River to the General Government. These events involved the only Ukrainian partisan force that presented itself as an alternative to Soviet and Nazi rule, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA.” – Karel C. Berkhoff, in Harvest of Despair
German efficiencyGerman efficiency
“Starting in 1942, the predominant Nazi reaction to partisans was to kill and burn, with careful planning and horrible precision. One of the earliest casualties of these assaults in the Reichskommissariat [Ukraine] was the village of Kortelisy near Ratne in Polissia. In May 1942, a partisan unit of some fifty locals and former Red Army soldiers destroyed the local police station. In the summer, a German unit called a village meeting and shot several relatives of partisans and Eastern Worker refugees. Still deeming the village a partisan stronghold, the Nazis dealt it a final blow some months later. One September day, peasants from surrounding villages who owned carts received an order to go to Kortelisy the next day. Early that September 23, a police company and Schuma [police auxiliaries] surrounded Kortelisy. Everybody, including all of the children, had to assemble and had to bring along their money and identity papers. A man said that he needed some time, for his children were not dressed yet and it was cold. A Schuma told him not to ‘waste’ the clothes: the meeting would be short and it would get hot, he said. Disabled villagers were taken to the square on carts. There they saw Kovel District Commissar Kassner, who told everyone through an interpreter that, because of their resistance to the German authorities, he had orders to burn them alive in their homes. But, he said, he had decided instead to shoot them. Somebody read out loud the names of those who would be spared: the village elder, the priest, the local Eastern Labor officials, the local Schuma, and the spouses and children of these villagers; all but the local Schuma were locked up in the school. Then the intruders forced the local men to dig a long and deep ditch and to undress. They started up car engines so as to muffle the sounds to come and started killing, first the men, and then the women and children. Thus nearly 2,900 people were shot with submachine guns and pistols, drowned, or bayoneted to death. . . . While the chosen locals were directed to the town of Ratne, the cart owners from the nearby villages were told to remove the possessions from the homes of those killed. The next day Kortelisy was burned to the ground and ceased to exist.” – Karel C. Berkhoff, in Harvest of Despair
Shoeless JoesShoeless Joes
“Joining an existing partisan group was never easy. Males who wanted to do so were often told to join the auxiliary police, to obtain arms and ammunition there, and then to desert. Newly recruited Red Partisans, as they often called themselves, pledged to serve ‘my motherland, the party, and my leader and comrade Stalin.’ They underwent a harsh probation period. Although partisans, Soviet or not, tended to consume a lot of alcohol, all were subject to severe disciplinary rules, which were enforced with beatings and other punishments by not only the commanders, but also political commissars or (in the large units) special sections of the NKVD. Unauthorized plunder and being drunk or asleep on duty often brought the death penalty. Partisans with a serious illness that endangered the group also could be killed. Female partisans worked as cooks and cleaners. As long as they did not accept a steady boyfriend, the males considered them common property. Pregnancies were usually aborted; babies born often were given away to peasants or killed. Very few partisans had medical knowledge. In all, the partisan life was restless and often brutal, marked by semidarkness, damp cold, dirty water, disease, lice, and shortages of food, tobacco, clothing, and shoes.” – Karel C. Berkhoff, in Harvest of Despair
Beat starving in a campBeat starving in a camp
“The overall quality of the Eastern Worker experience is not entirely clear. The few who worked for farmers were generally satisfied with their treatment and payment, and initially some even wanted to stay in Germany forever. On the whole, the Eastern Workers, who were mostly females, worked much harder than either western European or Balkan foreign workers. In their native Ukraine, women generally worked harder than men.” – Karel C. Berkhoff, in Harvest of Despair
WreckageWreckage
“I hopped off in the Podil [in Kiev] and walked down the Andriïvsky Uzviz, which was lined with beggars all the way. Some of them were whining and begging openly for money, others exposed their amputated limbs in silence. There were other, quiet, intelligent-looking elderly men and women, some with spectacles and pince-nez, standing there; they were professors and teachers of various kinds, like our math teacher who had died. In the case of some of them who sat there you couldn’t tell whether they were alive or dead. There had always been plenty of beggars about even before the war, but now there were so many it was simply frightful. They wandered all over the place, knocking on people’s doors, some of them people who had lost their homes through fire, some with babies, some of them on the run, and some swollen with hunger. It was bitterly cold and the people walked down the streets with grim expressions on their faces, hunching themselves up from the wind, worried, in ragged clothes, in all sorts of strange footwear and threadbare coats. It was indeed a city of beggars.” – A. Anatoli Kuznetsov, Babi Yar
The crop was ripeningThe crop was ripening
“There are almost no eyewitness accounts of public interactions between German and local city dwellers who were not girlfriends of the Germans. A glimpse comes from Jacob Gerstenfeld-Maltiel, a man who escaped from the Lviv ghetto and reached Dnipropetrovsk early in 1943. Despite his experiences as a Jew in the General Government, the way the Germans behaved toward the Slavs of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (all of whom he misidentifies as Russians) shocked him. It was for him ‘so abysmal that we, who came from the West, simply could not adjust to it. Here the Germans could really feel like the Herrenvolk. The Russians were put on the same level as cattle. It was inconceivable that a German would walk shoulder to shoulder with a Russian. If it happened that a German was obliged to walk with a Russian, he always strode a few paces behind him or in front. Germans sitting down with the locals in a café or a restaurant? The very idea was ridiculous! A German did not stand in line, whatever his rank was. He would commandeer the barber’s chair even if ten people were waiting for a haircut. He had a free ride in the trams and always had the right to a seat. The examples could be multiplied a hundred-fold, and though these were minor irritations, they humiliated the Russian population painfully and unceasingly.’ ” – Karel C. Berkhoff, in Harvest of Despair
Body, tooBody, too
“Passersby could be forced to watch public hangings of ‘saboteurs’ or ‘Jews.’ German onlookers, meanwhile, often took pictures. The victims were left suspended from the balconies or lampposts—there were no public gallows in the cities—for days. In Kiev, the first public hangings, of two ‘arsonists,’ apparently took place in late September 1941. They are also reported for that city in February and March 1942. On at least one of those later occasions, the ropes broke and, as a crowd looked on, the henchmen resorted to shooting the accused. Inhabitants of large cities also saw gas vans (actually, one van per city) speeding by. They called this mobile gas chamber that could hold and kill fifty prisoners the dushohubka—the destroyer of the soul.” – Karel C. Berkhoff, in Harvest of Despair
No winnersNo winners
“Food is given out in the evening. We stand in line, but instead of leading us into the kitchen in an organized fashion, they shout, ‘To the canteen!’ ‘Run!’ The hungry people rush to the kitchen, where there are several dirty barrels with a millet slop. Everybody knows that there is not enough food and tries to get at it first. Jostling starts. Now the ‘order supervisors’ appear and start up . . . a line using sticks, rods, rubber truncheons—anything they can beat you with. The usual results are head injuries, nearly broken arms, or the murder of an emaciated and weak prisoner. The beatings go on for hours. Meanwhile, half the prisoners no longer want to eat . . . They lie down on the damp ground—for there are not enough sheds for all—and sleep until 5 in the morning.” – Motel’e (quoted by Karel C. Berkhoff in Harvest of Despair; ellipses in original)
Special pleadingSpecial pleading
“They were taken away in groups of ten, past the trees. There, the first ten men dug themselves a common grave (the required amount of shovels had been arranged), and a brief volley of automatics rang out. The next ten were ordered to cover the grave with earth and to dig a new one. Thus it went on till the end. All died in silence, only one suddenly fell down with a heart-rending cry. He crawled across the ground to the legs of the soldiers who were coming to get the next ten. ‘Don’t kill me, my mother is Ukrainian!’ he screamed. They booted him hard, kicked his teeth out, and dragged him away under his arms. He fell silent, his bare feet dragging.” – Leonid Volynskii (quoted by Karel C. Berkhoff in Harvest of Despair)
Doing the Lord’s workDoing the Lord’s work
“Of the Ukrainians, the Baptists and Evangelical Christians seem to have helped Jews the most. In Volhynia alone, they apparently saved hundreds. These Protestants felt that their Christian faith allowed for nothing else. Also important was that they were a community in which mutual trust prevailed, so that they could quickly pass Jews from one locality to the next.” – Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair
And not one dime moreAnd not one dime more
“All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.” – Bishop Milton Wright (father of Orville and Wilbur)
UndeniableUndeniable
“Everybody is saying now that the Jews are being murdered. No, they have been murdered already. All of them, without exception—old people, women, and children. Those who went home on Monday have also been shot. People say it in a way that does not leave any doubt. No trains left Lukianivka at all. People saw cars with warm shawls and other things driving away from the cemetery. German ‘accuracy.’ They already sorted the loot! A Russian girl accompanied her girlfriend to the cemetery, but crawled through the fence from the other side. She saw how naked people were taken toward Babi Yar and heard shots from a machine gun. There are more and more such rumors and accounts. They are too monstrous to believe. But we are forced to believe them, for the shooting of the Jews is a fact. A fact which is starting to drive us insane. It is impossible to live with this knowledge. The women around us are crying. And we? We also cried on September 29, when we thought they were taken to a concentration camp. But now? Can we really cry? I am writing, but my hair is standing on end.” – Iryna Khoroshunova, October 2, 1941 (quoted by Karel C. Berkhoff in Harvest of Despair)
Nor forgottenNor forgotten
“We still don’t know what they did to the Jews. There are terrifying rumors coming from the Lukianivka Cemetery. But they are still impossible to believe. They say that the Jews are being shot . . . Some people say that the Jews are being shot with machine guns, all of them. Others say that sixteen train wagons have been prepared and that they will be sent away. Where to? Nobody knows. Only one thing seems clear: all their documents, things, and food are confiscated. Then they are chased into Babi Yar and there . . . I don’t know. I only know one thing: there is something terrible, horrible going on, something inconceivable, which cannot be understood, grasped, or explained.” – Iryna Khoroshunova, September 29, 1941 (quoted by Karel C. Berkhoff in Harvest of Despair; ellipses in original)
German efficiency in actionGerman efficiency in action
“The Jewish Holocaust in Dnieper Ukraine was rather different from the Holocaust in western and central Europe, where Jews were put into ghettoes and then, sooner or later, were shipped away to be gassed to death. In Dnieper Ukraine, most Jewish men, women, and children died at the edge of or inside their graves: anti-tank ditches dating back to Soviet times or pits dug by prisoners of war, non-Jewish locals, or the victims themselves.” – Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair
The end of the world as they knew itThe end of the world as they knew it
“After 1945 the world was totally different from what it had been in 1939; mid-century saw the balance of power shift westward across the Atlantic Ocean to a newly internationalist United States. Europe found itself divided along lines that were drawn up at wartime conferences in which most of the affected nations did not participate. Political division also took place in Asia, although not immediately after the war. Another consequence of the war was the decline of European colonialism. Empires were just too costly to maintain, and even though political leaders in Great Britain and France tried to hold on to their colonial possessions, the move toward independence in Africa and Asia was inevitable and irreversible.” – The World War II Desk Reference, Douglas Brinkley and Michael E. Haskew, eds.
Stalin would have had them all shot on sightStalin would have had them all shot on sight
“The war crimes trials in Germany and Japan have been criticized by some as having no legal, judicial basis. Many critics making this argument have stated that the Allies would have been better off simply executing the top German and Japanese leaders under military law instead of engaging in an elaborate legal charade. Those who supported the trials, however, believe that they were an important step in the establishment of internationally accepted standards of behavior, and that all future political leaders needed to know that they could be held accountable in an international forum for wartime behavior. Whatever their legality, narrowly defined, the trials were an unprecedented public airing of German and Japanese policies and conduct. In addition, the Axis leaders tried and punished were given a kind of due process their victims never enjoyed.” – The World War II Desk Reference, Douglas Brinkley and Michael E. Haskew, eds.
Burning down the houseBurning down the house
“Before 1939, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy were the most influential nations in the world, but when the war ended, Germany, Italy, and France were in shambles, and Great Britain was nearly bankrupt and its colonies were pressing for independence.” – The World War II Desk Reference, Douglas Brinkley and Michael E. Haskew, eds.