“Characterizing a victim group as a relentless threat to a perpetrator group is the fundamental mechanism of genocide. It allows perpetrators to interpret their violence as defensive and therefore both justified and unavoidable.” – Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death
“European society in medieval times and earlier had been dominated by malefically violent nobles who enforced their authority with serious physical violence, which they took pleasure in and celebrated. Homicide rates in medieval Europe even among commoners, who settled their disputes privately with little local interference from the law, were twenty to fifty times as high as in modern Europe. Violence declined across seven hundred years of Western history as monarchs moved to monopolize violence in order to monopolize taxation and thereby limit the power of the nobility and as an emerging middle class sought protection in official justice from the burdens of settling disputes at personal risk. Social controls over violence, primarily increasing access to courts of law, developed in parallel with changes in child-rearing practices away from physical brutalization. The criminal justice system vividly demonstrated this transformation. When official justice began to take control it advertised its authority with public torture and executions, spectacles attended by enthusiastic crowds. As private violence declined—that is, as populations were socialized to less personally violent identities—people lost their taste for such spectacles. Punishment retreated behind institutional walls.” – Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death
“The Nazi hecatomb was not ‘modern’ and ‘scientific,’ as it is frequently characterized, nor was it unique in human history. It was accomplished with the same simple equipment as the slaughters of European imperialism and, later, Asian and African civil war. State-sponsored massacre is a complex and recurring social epidemic. Understanding how its perpetrators learn to cope with its challenges is one important part of understanding how to prevent or limit further outbreaks, and no twentieth-century slaughter is better documented than the Third Reich’s.” – Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death
“The notorious gas chambers and crematoria of the death camps have come to typify the Holocaust, but in fact they were exceptional. The primary means of mass murder the Nazis deployed during the Second World War was firearms and lethal privation. Shooting was not less efficient than gassing, as many historians have assumed. It was harder on the shooters’ nerves, and the gas vans and chambers alleviated the burden. But shooting began earlier, continued throughout the war and produced far more victims if Slavs are counted, as they must be, as well as Jews. ‘The Nazi regime was the most genocidal the world has ever seen,’ writes sociologist Michael Mann. ‘During its short twelve years (overwhelmingly its last four) it killed approximately twenty million unarmed persons.’ “ – Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death
“Maps in Jewish museums from Riga to Odessa confirm that almost every village and town in the entire sweep of the Eastern territories has a killing site nearby. Two thousand Jews, for example, lived in and around the small town of Tykocin, northwest of Warsaw on the road to Bialystok in eastern Poland, worshiping in a square, fortified synagogue with a turreted tower and a red mansard roof, built in 1642, more than a century after Jewish settlement began in the region. Lush farm country surrounds Tykocin: wheat fields, prosperous villages, cattle in the fields, black-and-white storks brooding wide, flat nests on the chimneys of lucky houses. Each village maintains a forest, a dense oval stand of perhaps forty acres of red-barked pines harvested for firewood and house and barn construction. Inside the forests, even in the heat of summer, the air is cool and heady with pine; wild strawberries, small and sweet, strew the forest floor. Police Battalions 309 and 316, based in Bialystok, invaded Tykocin on 5 August 1941. They drove Jewish men, women and children screaming from their homes, killed laggards in the streets, loaded the living onto trucks and jarred them down a potholed, winding dirt road past the storks and the cattle to the Lopuchowo village forest two miles southwest. In the center of the Lopuchowo forest, men dug pits, piling up the sandy yellow soil, and then Police Battalions 309 and 316, out for the morning on excursion from Bialystok, murdered the Jews of Tykocin, man, woman and child. For months the forest buzzed and stank of death.” – Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death
“Serious dueling—dueling to the death to settle a conflict or an insult to one’s honor—arose among the nobility in early modern Europe at a time when states were centralizing. In medieval days the nobility had dominated its demesnes with serious violence, enforcing decrees, claiming and defending territory and levying tribute much as present-day mafiosi do. To assert authority and collect taxes, centralizing governments had to limit such private violence. Monarchs did so in part by establishing courts that the nobility had to attend as disarmed courtiers to seek royal favor. Monarchs also outlawed violent personal contests. The duel, a formalized violent personal contest, then developed outside the law as an implicit political protest, an assertion by the nobility that while it was prepared to bend its knee to the monarch in matters of taxation and social control, it did not recognize the monarch’s writ in matters of personal honor.” – Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death
“Many theories have been proposed to explain violent behavior, including loss of control, involuntary impulse, unconscious motivation, lack of conscience, character disorders, genetic inheritance or neurological damage. Some of these theories are anecdotal, based on an observer’s interpretation of a violent actor’s intentions. Others derive from statistical correlational studies, which by definition do not reveal causal relationships but merely identify qualities that may be associated in some way with violent behavior. That people become violent because they have low self-esteem, for example, is a widely accepted theory that minimal interaction with violent people, including violent professionals, quickly disconfirms: violent people usually have overweeningly high self-esteem verging on egomania, because they are confident of their ability to handle conflict and because other people, fearing them, show them great deference. Not all sociopaths are violent; not all violent people have neurological damage; unconscious motivation is by definition unprovable; and any theory of violent development that fails to account for official violent behavior as well as criminal is incomplete.” – Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death
“To say that governments monopolize violence is to imply that violence is a commodity that can be collected and stored. Violence is a behavior. As such, it resides in individuals, people who have experienced it and out of that experience learned to produce it more or less on demand. Weapons enter the picture as tools violent people may or may not use to amplify their violence production. Governments monopolize violence by authorizing some of their citizens to use violence in circumstances deemed legal and official. These citizens may have come to their official duties already experienced with violence, or they may gain their violent experience through official training. However thy learn to use violence, even these violent officials are authorized to do so only under specific circumstances, and if they use violence under unauthorized circumstances, such acts are deemed criminal. Police brutality and military atrocity, for example, are two categories of criminal violence.” – Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death
“The control of violence is a fundamental responsibility of government. Governments control violence by monopolizing it. They authorize military and police forces to use violence but deem criminal any other individual or institutional use. From this basic division, which evolved across five centuries in the West as governments enlarged and centralized, the common belief has emerged that governmental violence is rational (or at least deliberate and intentional), while private violence is irrational, aberrant, the product of psychopathology rather than deliberate intention. In fact, violence is violence, whether public or private, official or unofficial, good or bad. Violence is an instrumentality, not a psychopathology or a character disorder. Violence is a means to an end—domination and control—one of many possible means. Since its essence is injury, its efficacy in the long term is marginal, but its short-term advantages are obvious.” – Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death
“The Third Reich was built on violence. It governed with violence, dominated Europe with violence and provoked a violent response that finally destroyed it.” – Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death
“I was brought into the secret of the atomic bomb because [Admiral] Nimitz insisted that his intelligence officer be fully briefed as to what was going on. This occurred when Major General Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project’s director, arrived with representatives of the secretary of war’s ad hoc committee shortly after the first atomic bomb had been exploded in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July [1945]. After we had watched the movies of the Alamogordo test, I was convinced that if the bomb worked, it would give the Japanese a psychological ‘out’ from the terrible dilemma they were facing. Although they were defeated and knew it, they just could not surrender. I told the team from Washington that it was my firm opinion that only a decisive intervention from the emperor would end the war. The atomic bomb represented a new kind of warfare. It would give the emperor the chance to ‘turn off the faucet’ on the slaughter and end the war without loss of face. When I was asked my opinion of an appropriate target, I named Okura, an army arsenal city that had not yet been raided. Hiroshima, however, was selected.” – Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton, U.S.N. (Ret.), And I Was There
“In battle as in chess, it is the fool who lets himself be led into a reckless move through desperation.” – Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (quoted by Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton in And I Was There)
“Write thank you notes. Tip well. Sing. Drink responsibly. Remember that good manners cost nothing, and open doors. Reach out to someone who is lonely. Make them laugh. Help people smile.” – Scott Simon, Unforgettable
“Ruby-throated hummingbird. I found it on the walkway to the FBI agent’s house—a chew toy with iridescent feathers. Did it take a wrong turn into plate glass, did a cold front drop it from the sky? I cupped it in my hand and carried it home. I’d keep it till it died, then save the feathers. But it didn’t die, so I put it in a shoebox with a saucer full of red sugar water. When I opened the box the next morning, out it flashed to perform hover-and-dive routines around our TV, now resting on a lampshade, now trying to drink our curtains. I finally caught it with a butterfly net, spooked it into my hand, its heart whirring like a refurbished quartz watch, and opened the door. It shot free then, above our house, its wings renewing with the sky secret promises I would never understand.” – Lance Larsen, “A Brief List of Discoveries on My Paper Route”
“Learning to write is a mother-fucker. But what great feelings of joy and power and something more atomized than clarity when you get it right.” – Eileen Myles (interview by Amy King in Denver Quarterly)
“Aging has initiated me into a new layer of imperfection. It’s hard to write about it, to not take on the perception that aging is an embarrassment, a failure. If we let it, aging can bring compassion and grace.” – Dodie Bellamy (interview by Elizabeth Hall in Denver Quarterly)
“To be female in America, with few exceptions, is to have a fucked-up relationship with your body.” – Dodie Bellamy (interview by Elizabeth Hall in Denver Quarterly)
“Today is a gift. You
know how you can tell?
It’s got your name written on it
in your handwriting. It reads, ‘Equipment.’ “
– Lawrence Giffin, “Ease of Mobility”
“American suspicion of clandestine militarization had been aroused as early as 1923 when Earle Ellis, a marine corps undercover agent, had disappeared in the mandates after gaining passage to the islands on pretense of doing nature studies. Japanese authorities had informed our naval attaché only that Ellis had died of unknown causes on the island of Palau, in the western Carolines. Chief Pharmacist Lawrence Zembsch, of the American naval hospital in Yokohama that had been established in World War I, was sent to investigate the circumstances of Ellis’s death. Zembsch returned with the major’s ashes, but in a stupor, apparently drug-induced, and suffering from amnesia. He was hospitalized, with some hope that his recovery might clear the mystery. Unfortunately, Zembsch was killed in the naval hospital when it was destroyed in the great earthquake of 1 September 1923.” – Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton, U.S.N. (Ret.), And I Was There
“Science and skill will always win over luck and superstition.” – Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (quoted by Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton in And I Was There)
“In the navy she [Agnes Meyer Driscoll] was without peer as a cryptanalyst. Some of her pupils, like Ham Wright, were more able mathematicians but she had taught cryptanalysis to all of them, and none ever questioned her superb talent and determination in breaking codes and ciphers. She understood machines and how to apply them. . . . But her principal talent was her ability to get to the root of a problem, sort out its essential components, and find a way to solve it.” – Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton, U.S.N. (Ret.), And I Was There
“We don’t force bankruptcy debtors to give up every asset they own in order to get a bankruptcy discharge, recognizing that people need means to live after bankruptcy and need some way to get back on their feet. There is no societal benefit (in fact there is a great cost) in making people homeless or taking all of their clothes.” – Nathalie Martin and Ocean Tama, Inside Bankruptcy Law
“ ‘Information,’ writes Walter Benjamin, is ‘incompatible with the spirit of storytelling.’ For Benjamin, ‘half the art’ of telling a story lies in learning not to tell the news; narrative should suppress reportage, achieving instead ‘an amplitude that information lacks.’ Another name for this ‘amplitude’ might be what Flannery O’Connor calls ‘mystery’— fiction’s capacity, as she puts it, ‘to penetrate the concrete world’ of everyday facts, revealing ‘the image of ultimate reality.’ What she means is that reading allows us to face away from the world, and, in so doing, see through it. We read because we want to be somewhere else, but the best books make us realize that ‘elsewhere’ is where we already are. So, writing can turn toward or away from the known and the knowable, aiming at either information or mystery. One direction reports, reproduces, represents; the other points elsewhere, bringing the unprecedented into presence.” – David Winters, “Patterns of Anticipation”
“We do not allow people to file for bankruptcy and discharge most of their debts to be nice. The philosophy is that relieving people of their debts allows them to get back into and contribute to the economy once again. This is considered good for our overall economy, though this theory is not without some controversy.” – Nathalie Martin and Ocean Tama, Inside Bankruptcy Law
“The making of foreign policy in World War II came out of the great Allied conferences dominated by the military where the military staffs were the working members, and the civil arm, except for the two chiefs of state, was represented meagerly, if at all. Pomp and uniforms held the floor and everyone appeared twice as authoritative as he would have in the two-button business suit of ordinary life. Human fallibility was concealed by all those beribboned chests and knife-edge tailoring.” – Barbara Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China
“It is a feature of governments that the more important the problem, the further it tends to be removed from handling by anyone well acquainted with the subject.” – Barbara Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China
“On the borders of India the Japanese gamble had failed—although the fight went on—when Kohima was relieved and communications restored between Imphal and the Dimapur Road at the end of April [1944]. General Mutaguchi’s troops were left at the end of jungle trails without supply arrangements and with the monsoon pouring down. They fought on while they died of starvation and disease. By the end of June the fanatic offensive had crumbled into rain-soaked and putrefying chaos. When retreat was finally ordered in mid-July Japanese casualties including ill and wounded had reached 85 to 90 percent and the dead numbered 65,000 out of the original 155,000. On these same trails the refugees of the exodus of 1942 had dropped and died, now to be covered by the rotting corpses of their conquerors. The senseless tides of war rolled and receded impersonally over the shadowed uplands of Burma.” – Barbara Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China
“In military as in other human affairs will is what makes things happen. There are circumstances that can modify or nullify it, but for offense or defense its presence is essential and its absence fatal.” – Barbara Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China
“No nation has ever produced a military history of such verbal nobility as the British. Retreat or advance, win or lose, blunder or bravery, murderous folly or unyielding resolution, all emerge alike clothed in dignity and touched with glory. Every engagement is gallant, every battle a decisive action. There is no shrinking from superlatives: every campaign produces a general or generalship hailed as the most brilliant of the war. Everyone is splendid: soldiers are staunch, commanders cool, the fighting magnificent. Whatever the fiasco, aplomb is unbroken. Mistakes, failures, stupidities or other causes of disaster mysteriously vanish. Disasters are recorded with care and pride and become transmuted into things of beauty. Official histories record every move in monumental and infinite detail but the details serve to obscure. Why Singapore fell or how the Sittang happened remains shrouded. Other nations attempt but never quite achieve the same self-esteem. It was not by might but by the power of her self-image that Britain in her century dominated the world.” – Barbara Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China
“You can do anything if you’re not in a hurry.” – Fani Papageorgiou, “Bergmann’s Rule”