Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Killing Rosa: Hohenzollern Germany's Last Triumph, Nazi Germany's First.

"Sonyichka, the hide of a buffalo is proverbial for its toughness and thickness, but this tough skin had been broken. During the unloading, all the animals stood there, quite still, exhausted, and the one that was bleeding kept staring into the empty space in front of him with an expression on his black face and in his soft, black eyes like an abused child. It was precisely the expression of a child that has been punished and doesn’t know why or what for, doesn’t know how to get away from this torment and raw violence … All this time the prisoners had hurriedly busied themselves around the wagon, unloading the heavy sacks and dragging them off into the building; but the soldier stuck both hands in his trouser pockets, paced around the courtyard with long strides, and kept smiling and softly whistling some popular tune to himself. And the entire marvelous panorama of the war passed before my eyes. . . "

- Rosa Luxemburg, Breslau Prison, December, 1917.

1 Comments:

Blogger The Plump said...

I very much like this distinction:

"This convergence or symmetry does not automatically translate into a strict moral equivalence." It has become fashionable lately to make that precise equivalence between the ideologies and their followers,something that has always struck me as ahistorical and simply untrue.

The insight that it is the sheer quality of thought, writing and analysis that is a distinguishing feature is one of those sharp beams of light Hitchens is capable of producing to illuminate a discussion.

4:24 PM  

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