A shocking and nauseating assertion

[StarvingStudent47]

One of my classmates is an ultra-leftist. He recently gave me a book and insisted I read part of it: War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges, published in 2002. On flipping through it, I was shocked and appaled to find the following passage:



One of the most widely read works of Holocaust literature in Israel is not the quiet, meditative reflections of writers such as Primo Levi, who struggled to understand the capacity of evil in all of us, but Ka'Tzetnik's six autobiographic violumes, published in the 1950s. What troubles the Israeli historian Omer Bartov is that what "makes them so gripping: namely, their obsession with violence and perversity."

The main character of the Ka'Tzetnik's sextet, House of Dolls, is a young woman who is made into a prostitute for German soldiers. The books were reissued in 1994 and handed out by the Israeli Ministry of Education as recommended reading on the Holocaust in high schools.

"Nothing could be a greater taboo than deriving ****** pleasure from the fact that the central sites for these actions were the concentration camps," Bartov writes. "Nothing could be a greater taboo than deriving ****** pleasure from ****ography in the context of the Holocaust; hence nothing could be as exciting. That Isreali youth learned about *** and perversity, and derived ****** gratification, from books describing the manner in which Nazis tortured Jews, is all the more disturbing, considering that we are speaking about a society whose population consisted ofa large proportion of Holocaust survivors and their offspring.


Okay, so these to a-holes (Chris Hedges and Omer Bartov) think that your average Jew jerks off to Holocaust memoirs. So who is up for tracking these fools down and setting them straight by any means necessary?

By the way, Wesley Clark endorses this book. He has a big quote on the back. So for anyone thinking of voting for him, ask yourself--are you comfortable with a President who praises "intellectual works" like this and associates his name with them?

[James]

I am far from the left, but I'd have to read this entire book myself before I made any decisions on the matter. Is it out in paperback?

[martinexsquaddie]

so your upset that somebody quotes the personal viewpoint of a historian in a book :roll:

[Roger Rabbit]

that damn freedom of speech

[2Sheds_Jackson]

That Isreali youth learned about *** and perversity, and derived ****** gratification, from books describing the manner in which Nazis tortured Jews, is all the more disturbing, considering that we are speaking about a society whose population consisted ofa large proportion of Holocaust survivors and their offspring.

How do they know anybody derived ****** gratification from reading the books? Maybe the readers reaction was one of disgust or horror. Talk about specious reasoning. This is not scholarly work- it seems more like something you'd read at a clan meeting.

[DE_Six]

I read that book a while ago and I think it was pretty good, if somewhat bold in its message, and I'm far from being a pacifist leftist.

When you say you flipped through it, I take it you didn't read it. You should, it's worth reading. The part about the Balkans is quite interesting.

Bartov's appreciation of the Ka'Tzetnik's House of Dolls may differ from yours, that doesn't invalidate his work. He is one of the most respected Israeli historians. And nowhere does it say in the book that any ****** practice based or derived from the Holocaust is commonplace among Jews or any other community. Don't read what isn't there.

This book is a war correspondent's memoir and reflexion on violence just as much, if not more than a political essay. It certainly has no pretention as a study in sociology.

Hedges also wrote a book "What every person should know about war". I'd recommend it to anyone serious about serving in a combat MOS. It's the raw facts and numbers about war in a Q&A format, and it strips away a good deal of the romance off the duty. Everyone intented on serving should know it and make sure their motivations are the right ones.

As for Clark, I'm not surprised he endorsed the book, in fact it's the thing to do. Hedges spends a good half of the book writing about his impressions and his views on the Balkans conflict, a crisis Clark was involved in as CinC SACEUR in the late 90s. I think a good deal of people involved in this conflict, but outside of the warring factions, would recognize Hedges's analysis.

Anyway, I'd say read the book first, it's definitely impossible to judge it from this single passage.[/i]

[StarvingStudent47]

2Sheds hit the nail on the head.


so your upset that somebody quotes the personal viewpoint of a historian in a book :roll:
I'm both upset about what this so-called "historian" believes (historians aren't delivering God's Honest Truth, just their own opinion--shoot, there ain't even any requirements to call yourself a "historian"--see, I'm a "historian" right now, and so are you, and so is everyone on this board), and the fact that this moron author repeated it *as truth*.


that damn freedom of speech
I didn't say he should be jailed for his actions. I said he's a f---tard. Completely different. "Freedom of speech" does not mean "freedom from criticism for being a lying jack_ss." Just look at Michael Moore. He "exercises his right to freedom of speech" by making Bowling for Columbine; the rest of our exercise OUR freedom of speech by pointing him out for the lying idiot he is. Omer Bartov is no different.

[DE_Six]

I'm both upset about what this so-called "historian" believes (historians aren't delivering God's Honest Truth, just their own opinion--shoot, there ain't even any requirements to call yourself a "historian"--see, I'm a "historian" right now, and so are you, and so is everyone on this board), and the fact that this moron author repeated it *as truth*.


See, that's the part I don't get. Where does Bartov pretends to deliver the truth exactly? Hedges quotes the appreciation Bartov made of the House of Dolls and its use as academic material. He doesn't mention anything about widespread ****** deviation based on Holocaust-related material, merely pointing out that it is presented to Israeli high school student. And since high school is an age where most teens discover ******ity and so on, it's rather odd to present them with a book that provides a form of ****** stimulation (it is after all quite graphic) in the context of the Holocaust.

Now, I don't know if you read the House of Dolls, but I'd qualify it as adult reading. Here in Canada, when we get to the subject of the Holocaust in high school, we read Elie Wiesel's Night and Primo Levi's If this is a man. House of Dolls is not exactly in the same league. The subject and the depiction that's made of it has a strong ****** content. I don't mean to say that children should be shielded from ******ity at all cost, but it's a rather odd choice to present the Holocaust.

The only questionable fact I find in the passage is wether or not House of Dolls is actually presented to Israeli youth. Maybe some board members could enlighten us on this, but I have no reason to believe Bartov would make this up. The other unknown is waht age exactly are the aforementioned "youth". I think university students would make a much different reading than 14-year-olds of the same book.

If it is presented to high school students, it is safe to assume at least some of them will draw ****** gratification from it. Hell, at this age, they're such horndogs they get stiff when the car hits a bump on the road!
House of Dolls is indeed very graphic, with depictions of ****** acts performed under coercion, that often slides into sadistic behaviors. I agree that it's not quite appropriate to use that kind of material to present the Holocaust to teenagers.

If Hedges agrees with Bartov for some reasons, he can write about it. And that brings me back to the first point: this passage is neither a condemnation of Jewish people's ****** habits (so I don't get it when you write
so these to a-holes think that your average Jew jerks off to Holocaust memoirs.) neither a sociology study. It's an observation that it's quite odd to use such a graphic, mature-themed novel where the Holocaust is only a background to present the issue to high school student. I'm stretching a bit, but it's like screening Jenna Jameson movies to ***-ed classes.

Really, read it before calling the author names. In the context of the entire book, this passage is quite fitting and definitely not some weird antisemitic propaganda.
The very idea of Klansmen reading Omer Bartov, a liberal Jew, leaves me wondering...
And as much as I loathe Fat-A** Moore, I have to agree with Rupert: freedom of speech also covers manipulations of the truth and flat-out lies.
But I don't think it's fair to put Bartov or Hedges in the same league as Moore.

[2Sheds_Jackson]

I don't think you can describe depicting what the Germans did to the Jewish women as ****ography any more than you could say that the medical experimentation they did was practicing medicine.

It seems to me that what this truly exposes, is that Bartov is ******ly stimulated by it. I don't know about his other work, but here he clearly assumes that others would share his ****** predilections. Man, if I were him I'd prolly keep my mouth shut rather than tell everybody about what freakishness turned me on. :lol:

[DE_Six]

I don't think you can describe depicting what the Germans did to the Jewish women as ****ography any more than you could say that the medical experimentation they did was practicing medicine.

It seems to me that what this truly exposes, is that Bartov is ******ly stimulated by it. I don't know about his other work, but here he clearly assumes that others would share his ****** predilections. Man, if I were him I'd prolly keep my mouth shut rather than tell everybody about what freakishness turned me on. :lol:

Is it ****ography? It describes coerced intercourse, in a much graphic manner. Is snuff ****ography? S&M, fetichism and all the kinky deviations and practices? Sounds like ****ography to me. Is it the main object of the book? No, it's an Holocaust memoir, albeit a rather twisted one. I don't think it's appropriate for academic purposes. I don't know if you read it, but the way it's written sounds to me like noir ****ography.
Same goes for Nazi "medicine". It was twisted, sick and inhumane, but it was science nonetheless, except for cases of pure torture (like Dr. Mengele, who barely kept records of his "experiments"). Some of it led to progress in the domain of resistance to G force. (BTW, I'm in NO way justifying, excusing or defending Nazi experiments, merely pointing out the parallel)

Does Bartov gets off of it? Maybe, I don't know him, and quite frankly I don't care. His point remains valid. He may gets aroused by this type of writing, but the fact remain, Israeli youth are being presented with a perverted picture of the Holocaust. There's a plethora of memoirs that deal with ghetto life, camps ordeal, forced labor and oppression, but they choosed one dealing with forced prostitution. I'm not saying this part of the story should be censored, but I agree it's weird and inappropriate to have school kids reading this.
If Bartov gets off on this, what to think about the person who decided teenagers should read it to get acquainted with the Holocaust?

Anyway, my point here is simply that Hegdes' book shouldn't be judged on the mere basis of an out-of-context excerpt. Thsi passage quoted above makes it look like antisemitic propaganda, which it's not. In fact, that's about the only part about Jews or Israel. Out of 300 pages. This specific part deals with the duality between Eros and Thanatos in the collective myth of war, how combat is sometimes likened to *** in litterature( in a figurative way, of course). In this case, the excerpt, even if it concerns only Bartov, and none of the many students who read the House of Dolls, is quite fitting.

[Marxist203]

Jerking off to the holocaust? I thought that would be something that White Supremacists would do...I dont think this is really anything to get up in arms about.

Those Israeli kids are ****ed...

[Salty Dog]

this is too strange for me to make any contribution to the conversation.

[fred_engles]

One of my classmates is an ultra-leftist. He recently gave me a book and insisted I read part of it: War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges, published in 2002. On flipping through it, I was shocked and appaled to find the following passage:



One of the most widely read works of Holocaust literature in Israel is not the quiet, meditative reflections of writers such as Primo Levi, who struggled to understand the capacity of evil in all of us, but Ka'Tzetnik's six autobiographic violumes, published in the 1950s. What troubles the Israeli historian Omer Bartov is that what "makes them so gripping: namely, their obsession with violence and perversity."

The main character of the Ka'Tzetnik's sextet, House of Dolls, is a young woman who is made into a prostitute for German soldiers. The books were reissued in 1994 and handed out by the Israeli Ministry of Education as recommended reading on the Holocaust in high schools.

"Nothing could be a greater taboo than deriving ****** pleasure from the fact that the central sites for these actions were the concentration camps," Bartov writes. "Nothing could be a greater taboo than deriving ****** pleasure from ****ography in the context of the Holocaust; hence nothing could be as exciting. That Isreali youth learned about *** and perversity, and derived ****** gratification, from books describing the manner in which Nazis tortured Jews, is all the more disturbing, considering that we are speaking about a society whose population consisted ofa large proportion of Holocaust survivors and their offspring.


Okay, so these to a-holes (Chris Hedges and Omer Bartov) think that your average Jew jerks off to Holocaust memoirs. So who is up for tracking these fools down and setting them straight by any means necessary?
Wow. I understand this is a very emotional issue, StarvingStudent, so I'll try to tread lightly.

Simply put, humans are complicated beings ******ly, and react, on a very instinctive/subconcious level, to ****** stimuli. A text like House of Dolls is simultaneusly a discription of the most revolting acts possible, and a very disturbingly ****** narrative (if you think it's disturbing to read, just imagine what it must have been like to write - the book is, I believe, based based on the diary of the author's sister). It is from this contrast, this diametrically opposite reaction, that the book derives much of its power as narrative (full disclosure: I've actually never read House of Dolls, but I've heard quite a bit about it, and have read other books by the same author).

I'm not convinced, therefore, that you can accuse either the author of the book or of the professor quoted in it, of saying anything wrong. Is it nonetheless appalling? Well, yes, yes it is...but not in a way that's a criticism of Israelis or Jews. Humanity can be an appalling thing at times, and books like these are how we address our fear and hatred of that side of us all.

Have you ever read the Handmaid's Tale (by Margaret Atwood) or seen the (crappy) movie? It's kinda a similar scenario [but much milder]. It has a scene in which the female protaganist is raped (of a sort: it's more accurately a ritualized, degrading, and involuntary ****** ritual of the fictional society described.) At any rate, it's not a pleasant scene. Nonetheless, particularly with the film version, I don't think anyone can help reacting to it on some instinctive ****** level - it becomes not just rape, but *** too, and there's some dark subconcious beauty mixed in the concious repulsion and ugliness. That doesn't the viewer a bad person, or a rapist, or even someone with rape fantasies or anything like that. It's simply about recognizing the extremely complex, and sometimes frighteningly contradictory and confusing behaviour of the human mind.

[That turned out to be a bit the incomprehensible rant - but I'm too tired to make any sense right now. Off to sleep...]

[mocking_loudly_died]

I like pies.

[Salty Dog]

I like pies.

f***in pies are good.