So, yesterday was the official kick-off of the Keep Portland Weird festival here in Paris, which meant that I had a reading/screening in the...
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Reading this book is a very, very long and slow slog. It's one virtue is the presentation of Nazi mass murderers as something more than caricatures. It took a massive accumulation of detailed history by the author to pull this off, since the inner life he imagines for them needs to be played out at length in accurately reconstructed settings in order to be realiistic. Even so, the main character is not psychologically convincing. I cannot put myself in that man's shoes. So he ends up being a surrealistically intricate caricature. But this is also true of the psychopaths we run into in everyday life. Only the psychologists and novelists among us are motivated to get inside the skins of these people.
On the other hand, the social interactions of the characters is convincingly portrayed and dramatized enough to keep you reading. Two intellectual points emerging from their dialogues have been mostly ignored by reviewers in the commercial press: 1. The SS characters elaborate an internally consistent morality for their actions. In a nutshell, morality applies to the Volk, but not to the billions of humanity outside it. What benefits the Volk is good, including sacrificing the interests of any or most of its members. 2. Some of the characters are depicted as visioning the Holocaust as a mere first step toward the eventual removal of all non-Volkist populations, by slaughter or by exile to a conquered Soviet Union. The choice between slaughter and exile would be decided by efficiency studies.
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David McCullough has commented on (2) products.
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
David McCullough, August 21, 2009
Reading this book is a very, very long and slow slog. It's one virtue is the presentation of Nazi mass murderers as something more than caricatures. It took a massive accumulation of detailed history by the author to pull this off, since the inner life he imagines for them needs to be played out at length in accurately reconstructed settings in order to be realiistic. Even so, the main character is not psychologically convincing. I cannot put myself in that man's shoes. So he ends up being a surrealistically intricate caricature. But this is also true of the psychopaths we run into in everyday life. Only the psychologists and novelists among us are motivated to get inside the skins of these people.On the other hand, the social interactions of the characters is convincingly portrayed and dramatized enough to keep you reading. Two intellectual points emerging from their dialogues have been mostly ignored by reviewers in the commercial press: 1. The SS characters elaborate an internally consistent morality for their actions. In a nutshell, morality applies to the Volk, but not to the billions of humanity outside it. What benefits the Volk is good, including sacrificing the interests of any or most of its members. 2. Some of the characters are depicted as visioning the Holocaust as a mere first step toward the eventual removal of all non-Volkist populations, by slaughter or by exile to a conquered Soviet Union. The choice between slaughter and exile would be decided by efficiency studies.
(2 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
Laws of the Game: How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance (Princeton Science Library) by Manfred Eigen
David McCullough, November 27, 2006
It's one of the best books you'll ever read.(2 of 4 readers found this comment helpful)