Yea!
I wanna know what you are reading atm
I know there are plenty wormers out there who happen to read a book once in a while (surprisingly many). Some like fiction (& fantasy), others seem more interested in non-fiction. Me, for one.
Anywho, doesn't matter, tell me what you are reading.
I myself am reading a biography of Herman Boerhaave atm, a famous (Dutch) physician from the 1700's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Boerhaave
It's 350 pages long, which is a lil' too much for the lifestory of an 'ordinary' scientist. But there's lots of info on the scientific culture of his days which is really interesting (the 'mechanical' approach to life and the human body of Descartes, the new interest for experimentation and rationalisation, as well as for the traditional view (Galenus and the four different bodily fluids)).
It's only published in Dutch though
Something for DarkOne?
I also just finished up on reading a very interesting book:
Perhaps some of you germans have heard about it.
The authors discovered a whole collection of transcripts of conversations between german (and italian) POW's in World War Two that were secretly overheard by the British and American intelligence.
In Germany it created a little scandal because the Wehrmacht doesn't really get out of it well. The conversations show that many ordinary soldiers were compromised in the violence that took place in both the east and the west. Against enemy troops, partisans and against the jews and ordinary Russian, Polish and French citizens.
It was interesting to read how in wartime the rules of normal society didn't apply and that people judged events from a very different perspective.
As ordinary, peace-loving citizens we are appalled by the violence that happens in wartime and fail to comprehend how human beings are capable of such barbaric acts.
I can't say I have an answer now, but it was quite astonishing that these 'warcrimes' we speak of were never, or hardly ever an issue to those involved. Whenever the topic of violence was raised in the conversations it never raised an eyebrow. People getting killed was seen as 'normal' and there was hardly any empathy involved for those who suffered from the violence. With one exception: the comrades of the soldier.
It makes for incredibly weird conversations:
Pohl: "I had to drop bombs onto a train station in Posen ( Poznan ) on the second day of the war in Poland . Eight of the 16 bombs fell in the city, right in the middle of houses. I didn't like it. On the third day I didn't care, and on the fourth day I took pleasure in it. We enjoyed heading out before breakfast, chasing individual soldiers through the fields with machine guns and then leaving them there with a few bullets in their backs."
Meyer: "But it was always against soldiers?"
Pohl: "People too. We attacked convoys in the streets. I was sitting in the 'chain' (a formation of three aircraft). The plane would wiggle a little and we would bank sharply to the left, and then we'd fire away with every MG (machine gun) we had. The things you could do. Sometimes we saw horses flying around."
Meyer: "That's disgusting, with the horses…come on!"
Pohl: "I felt sorry for the horses, not at all for the people. But I felt sorry for the horses right up until the end." This lack of empathy also shows in the way crimes against jewish people were approached. The soldiers were only interested in where it happened and whether there were any cute girls involved. And if that was the case, it was considered 'a shame'.
The act itself, of killing the jews, was never called into question. The only thing about it that met resistance was the 'messy' way in which it was done and the possibility of 'jewish revenge' after the war.
The book also mentions some other disturbing facts, like 'mass killings-tourists' that even included children; german pilots roaming the streets of English cities in search for 'human booty' and evidently 'enjoying' it a lot.
New for me was also the extreme violence that was used by the Wehrmacht and SS in Italy (against civilians) and also the common practice of (western) allied forces to shoot german prisoners on sight (the Wehrmacht soldiers were sometimes spared, but the SS troops were shot without questions asked).
The extreme violence commited in World War Two wasn't 'national socialist', as ideology hardly ever occupied the mind of troops in the field (only in the SS did it play a certain part in inciting violence), but instead the result of regular/normal warfare that became increasingly grim.
The Wehrmacht for example already commited war crimes in the Netherlands (and France) where POW's were shot or used as human shield. That has nothing to do with an 'extermination war on inferior people' as some people see world war two. It's common war practice, and the violence in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan is no different.
For more info:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/rape-murder-and-genocide-nazi-war-crimes-as-described-by-german-soldiers-a-755385.html
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