It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.
This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.
Tag: women literary-criticism silence literature world-war-ii quiet jane-austen cruelty 1960s europe england rabbits wind-in-the-willows countryside napoleon hiroshima sussex 11th-century earl-of-bessborough gassing hampshire mansions massacre meadow myxomatosis napoleonic-wars new-forest persuasion-novel richard-adams theatre-of-ancient-greece townships war-memorials watership-down
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.
Christopher HitchensTag: honesty history bravery prejudice antisemitism historians holocaust racism accuracy jews russia poland nazism ukraine national-socialism stalinism massacre 1989 belarus berlin-wall operation-reinhard polish-jews slavic-peoples timothy-d-snyder yale-university
Thanks for treating me like, you know, a person through all this shit. I know that isn't always easy. (Stark)
You do have a habit of pissing on other people's welcome mats. But, when a gentleman gives you a booty call to a massacre, it's easy to forgive. Ciao. (Candy)
Tag: forgiveness massacre booty-call
My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.
Donald MillerTag: fables flood noah massacre
What can bombs know of the illuminated fields so golden with heaven in your heart’s sacred lands?
AberjhaniTag: humanity war faith heaven hope spirituality survival violence transcendence terrorism bombs human-rights-day massacre strength-and-courage survival-of-the-human-soul the-human-heart violence-in-syria
As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap the joy of love.
PythagorasTag: thought-provoking massacre caring-for-others
A collective insanity seemed to have seized the nation and turned them into something worse than beasts. The princess de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette's intimate friend, was literally torn to pieces; her head, breasts, and pudenda were paraded on pikes before the windows of the Temple, where the royal family was imprisoned, while a man boasted drunkenly at a cafe that he had eaten the princess' heart, which he probably had.
J. Christopher HeroldTag: death cannibalism aristocracy french-revolution massacre
In the history of battles and wars, the massacres of civilians were the main reason of revolutions success.
M.F. MoonzajerTag: history war revolution battle massacre civilians
Where, indeed? Captain Vincent Reed had been born in the city of Richmond, Virginia, of northern parents who were stationed there by the telegraph company. He had attended West Point and he thought he knew something about warfare, having served under General Pope in his long and futile struggle against General Stonewall Jackson. Those men were fighters who would face the enemy till the last bullet was fired, but neither would participate in such a slaughter.
Reed had had his troops in position. He was quite prepared to rush in for the kill, and he had positioned himself so that he would be in the vanguard when his men made their charge against the guns of the young braves threatening the left flank. But when he saw that the enemy had no weapons, that even their bows and arrows were not at hand, and that he was supposed to chop down little girls and old women, he rebelled on the spot, taking counsel with no one but his own conscience.
Tag: native-americans slaughter massacre
She knew nothing of the massacre that went on around her, but when she released the wail of a broken hearted mother, one man heard her. The one who took her son's life.
Elizabeth BourgeretTag: life pain loss hurt mother broken-heart son massacre wail
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