#antiwar literature

[orlando-in-love]

"Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?"

-Joseph Heller, Catch-22

[a-typical]

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

[nerdby]

"Now I lay me down to sleep my bombproof cellar's good and deep but if I'm killed before I wake remember God it's for your sake amen." -Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo

[goldendiie]

i know you guys loveee hearing about my academic pursuits (you know. instead of sargemore or whatever...), but i finally landed on a thesis topic! diverging away from counterculture (and saving my big, obnoxiously midwestern antiwar hippie project for my PhD dissertation), I'm going to explore how the cold war, space age, and science culture has survived through collective memory... using video games as my new historicist literature. in other words: i'm going to write about portal 2 and fallout for my masters thesis in history. god bless.

[milfstalin]

And informants and provocateurs are the state’s hired gunmen. Government agencies pick people that no one will notice. Often it’s impossible to prove that they’re informants because they appear to be completely dedicated to social justice. They establish intimate relationships with activists, becoming friends and lovers, often serving in leadership roles in organizations. A cursory reading of the literature on social movements and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s reveals this fact. The leadership of the American Indian Movement was rife with informants; it is suspected that informants were also largely responsible for the downfall of the Black Panther Party, and the same can be surmised about the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Not surprisingly, these movements that were toppled by informants and provocateurs were also sites where women and queer activists often experienced intense gender violence, as the autobiographies of activists such as Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrate.

Maybe it isn’t that informants are difficult to spot but rather that we have collectively ignored the signs that give them away. To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. [emphasis mine.] Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence[1] as a threat to the survival of our struggles. We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

[mswyrr]

Re: people saying that the Tar/garyens can't have done a conquest because the First Men and Andals "got there first" - uh, no.

The US Southwest? Is a place of *two conquests*. That is the standard view within the historical literature on the history of the region. First the Spanish engaged in conquest against indigenous peoples and then the US lopped off the upper half of Mexico and took land and displaced and pillaged people within that area, engaging in a second conquest. And over the centuries in between these two conquests, indigenous people groups were forced West from US colonization along the East and that created complex interrelationships and violence between indigenous groups due to displacement as well that isn't easy to quantify.

That's one example of how complex these dynamics can be over centuries, let alone millennia, which is the kind of timeframe we're talking in Westeros. But NO none of that makes it okay to march on people and burn civilians alive from the air to dominate and subjugate whole people groups! Forcing them to unite under your throne of conquest. And the Dornish certainly saw it as a conquest and resisted it as such - and good for them!

IMO antiwar and anti-conquest themes drive House of the Dragon and the text doesn't make sense without that context that the throne all this bloodshed is over is a throne of conquest. That it is unjust and not worth any of this. That grasping for it is futile and only breaks and destroys people. That Aegon I and Rhaenys and Visenya poisoned their entire family and doomed the dragons with what they did. Leaving their descendants with a legacy of conquest and a love of this throne (and a set of "spiritual beliefs" warped to justify conquest!) that they are now slaughtering each other and driving the dragons extinct over. I could be wrong - but the story actually makes sense and is powerful if read that way (in the same way it has made since and been powerful since s1 if you accept that it centers two canon queer women and is driven in pivotal ways by a broken queer love) and there is absolutely no reason for me not to read it that way. Certainly not the First Men and the Andals.

edit: It's not an area I've read as deeply on, but I am pretty sure the 1st Century Roman conquest of Britain and then the subsequent 11th Century Norman Conquest are also a case of multiple conquests in the same place and potentially a source GRRM was inspired by in the depiction, since he's read deeply on European history esp. in Britain.

[ramrodd]

Jesus' Empty Tomb? Just the Facts Please!

COMMENTARY:

The first account of the Resurrection of Jesus was written by Pilate and transmitted to Rome under the transit status of euangilion  before Pentecost. Tertullian cites Roman archives of Tiberius proposing to enroll Jesus in the Roman Pantheon based on an intelligence report from Judea. That intelligence report is reflected in what we now refer to as the Gospel of Peter which Peter refers to in Acts 15:7 to validate Paul's version of the Christian doctrine Peter related to Cornelius in Acts 10:34 - 43.

I can understand why you, as a antiwar draft dodger, might not be up to speed on military SOPs, but , as an Air Force Brat. it appears to be more politic than authentic ignorance.  

I ran through your course on Why Mark was Ignored last nitght. I am a process theology guru and my advice to you in that capacity is to drop the dialectical Marxism of your critical historic method and combine Mark 11 to 15:8 with John 11 - 19. and employ Hegel's critical literary method based on Hegel's Historic Gestalt and Dialectical Synthesis. The Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John all begin at the moment Jesus pops up over the miltiary horizon of both Cornelius and Herod Antipas, The Harmonics of these accounts of basically the same moments in  the singular narrative of Jesus the LOGOS. Both Hegel and Heidegger see Jesus moving through time and space the same way. Everybody was trying to prove that Hegel's paradox was crap, but he and New both established the 5yh Law of Logic as the Point of Paradox in a chaotic system.

The Ten Events in your presentation is worth the price of admission many times over. THis will prove to be the great legacy of the Jesus Semonar. I've told President Putin through a commercial relationship I developed with the Kremlin during the Nixon and Carter administrations that he needs to expel anyone associated with Campus crusade for Christ as as agents of American moral confusion Russia doesn't need at the moment but that i would encourage the Russian Orthodox Church to invite both N.T. Wright and the Jesus seminar to conduct seminars for faithful Marxists like Him. Their faith  will be rewarded.

As will yours. The difference between you and me as refugees from the 60s, you followed your heart ias an anti-war/Civil Rights protester and I followed Yaweh, Queen of Battle to  Vietnam. A mother will follow her heart into a burning building to save her child, but a fire fight performs his duty to Yaweh, Queen of Battle. Yaweh, Queen of battle is the abiding spirit of the uterus, which is just one reason why Tommy Tuberville is the Poster Boy for the Ivy League Socialism of William F. Buckley and the John Birch society.

Here's the thing: you and N.T. Wright are crippling your scholarship on Paul by denying the harmonics of Hegel in favor of either the dialectical Idealism of Tom Wright's 60 experience or the contrarian concets of the dialectical Marxism of  Post Modern Historic Deconstruction.. This has been all the rage in the American university system since the SDS occupied Columbia University and turned Eisenhower's legacy on its head. Which has been the gift that keeps on giving to the white supremacist agenda of the John Birch Society and Tommy Tuberville. And Trump. These Ten Events are the Ten Commandments of Christian Stewardship and Servant Leadership.:\

Be Humble Be Decisive Be Disruptive' Be Discerning Be Grounded Be Focused Ge  Balanced be   Mindful Be Obedient Be Generous

It is useful to remember that Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" is an explication of the economics of Jesus, thanks to Hegel. Smith's "Invisible Hand" is a mechanism he invents to accomodate the dynamics of Free Markets.

The euangelion is Christian literature. The intelligence report Pilate sent to Tiberius conveyed the slang the Roman soldiers employed to designate Jesus Follower in Judea to Roman society is the original euangelion of Mark 1:1 and Acts 15:7 Mark15  is an edited version of Pilate's euangelion to Tiberius. Euangelion is the transit status of Pilate's intelligence report that Tertullian cites in Book V of his Apology, What Mark 1:1 means is that this is the Gestalt of the Sociology and Anthropology  surronding the narrative  thread of the LOGOS as He moved through history. Jesus is the Point of Paradox in the Harmonic of the Dasein of Jesus with the culture He moved through. He was the leading edge of the wave of the future when they nailed  Him to a cross and set the world of fire.

The leadership priorities of Cornelius, as the Archetype of the Roman military servant leader was the same as the leadership priorities of the Command Sergeant Major of the Arm, Mission:Men:Self. Cornelius was the personification of the Ten Commandments of the Christian Servant L Leader when he wrote The Gospel of Mark. He and his household had just been baptized by the Holy Spirit with the Spirity of the Lord just like Peter at Pentecost. The finger prints of the Holy Spirit are all over the Gospels and Acts, but, if you are using dialectical Marxism, your eyes will never see the Kingdom of Heaven right in front of you.

Without Hegel, your wonderful memories of  Israel would be meaningless to the Gospel of Mark.

[serge4nt]

tector doesn't divulge his real name and his military status not only because he still carries the deaths of his squad overseas, but because of how deeply he despises the military. the truth is, he never really liked it - but he was 17 when the towers fell, and while the "patriotic" fervor that swept over the country didn't affect him - he had already begun his journey into discontent with the state of things, given his poverty-stricken upbringing and his sexuality and gender, though he wasn't aware of the latter at the time - it affected his friends. he was 17, and he was a high school dropout, with no prospects, no job, living in a dead-end, small, southern town destined to be a criminal or a drunk, and so, when his friends said they were enlisting, he decided to, as well. because the recruiter said it was a chance for a better life. he would gain a new skillset, he would make new friends, see new places - the government would pay for his education upon return. he believed those lies. he believed it'd just be a couple years of his life where he wouldn't do much and then he'd come home and he'd get to be better.

it became pretty clear when he was shipped out, though, that it wouldn't be anything like that at all. it was brutal, it was dirty, it was violent - it was a crime against humanity, in tector's eyes. the things they did, what was done to them to ensure they'd do those things, is something he doesn't know how to describe - but he does understand the deep shame that comes with it all. and he understands that when he finally got home, he didn't feel like a better man; he didn't feel like much of anything. he felt hollowed-out, like some essential part of him, his heart and maybe even his spirit, was cut out of him and buried over there: he struggled to do much of anything other than get out of bed long enough to eat something, primarily to appease his sister. he didn't go to school. he sure didn't feel like a fucking hero.

it was about a year after his return that he felt the need to go and tell the recruiter exactly that - and it was by chance he happened upon an antiwar protest on the way. it all shifted for him, then, and slowly, he became invested in learning about antiwar movements, which led to anticapitalism, and from there, a quick fall down a leftism pipeline; he devoured antiracist and anticapitalist literature, despite never quite enjoying reading when it was forced upon him in school, because he's an undiagnosed dyslexic but no one bothered to figure that out - teachers only ever told him he wasn't trying hard enough, or that maybe he just wasn't that bright. but he powered through it, desperate to understand more, and to really know that he wasn't alone: there were other veterans with similar feelings, similar beliefs, and the further he looked, the more he felt he really had a place in the world now.

it's almost like what the recruiter said: when you get home, you won't be the same. but he wasn't better because of the war. he'd become better despite it.

he got involved in punk culture, which led to him discovering lgbt culture - and eventually, he becomes comfortable in the knowledge that he's gay and nonbinary. it was terrifying at first, to see in person people living a truth he'd always felt inside of him, but once he understood that it could be outside of him, too, tector never looked back.

because of his misgivings about the army, he never initially sought out any organized resistance movements when the invasion begun; it was just him and some friends for a long time. he doesn't join the 2nd mass until the months of tom's disappearance, and because of his look and attitude, he's shuffled into the berserkers - and he doesn't mind it, really, because it gives him the allowance to be disgruntled with the military, since that's what's expected - but he did have to fight the urge to fall into old habits, because the brainwashing of the military goes deep. (it's why it's harder to resist when they get to charleston - it'd been coming on for a while. it's why he was so cagey when it was just him and weaver alone.)

but i don't think tector ever hated aloysius as a name, to be honest. sure, it caused him light teasing throughout his life, because what the hell kinda name is that? but he's grown into tector as a name. he likes it. it feels very him. he most likely won't ever disclose that it isn't his name, because it is. he doesn't feel the need to inform anyone he was born with another one.

[mariacallous]

The Russian artist Lyudmila Razumova and her husband Alexander Martynov shared a love of nature and outdoors, a free-spirit lifestyle, and liberal convictions. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the couple traveled from Tver region to Moscow to take part in mass protests. When they saw the police decimating the small crowd of courageous people who had come out to protest the war, Alexander and Lyudmila were disheartened. On their return home, they began to come out at night to spray protest graffiti around their small town and the nearby villages. Within a month, they were arrested and charged with vandalism, and later with spreading disinformation under the new Russian law against “fakes” about the Russian military. Unexpectedly, the pressures of confinement and the court trial drove a wedge between the couple who had planned to spend the rest of their lives together. The Russian outlet Verstka published the story of two activists who loved one another but parted ways while a Russian court tried them for having an opinion. Meduza in English has translated it.

The arrest

On March 23 last year, a month from the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the 64-year-old Alexander Martynov stopped at a gas station to fill the tank of his taxi cab. Several police operatives approached him and told him to come with them to the local police station. Around the same time, another police squad rang the bell of Martynov’s apartment. His 55-year-old wife Lyudmila Razumova opened the door. Half an hour later, the husband and wife met at the police office and learned they were being charged with vandalism and spreading “fakes” about the Russian military.

The detectives confronted them with the testimonies of property owners who complained about the couple’s antiwar graffiti on their buildings. While being questioned, neither of them realized that they would not be coming home that day, nor that year. From the police station, the husband and wife were sent off to two different pretrial jails.

Writing to the Verstka correspondent Anastasia Musatova from jail, Alexander told her he had always been a liberal. During Gorbachev’s perestroika, he embraced the changes. In the 1990s, he was hopeful about Russia’s new democratic future. As books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Grossman, and Andrey Platonov became available, he plunged into the new Russian literature. For a while, he made a good living by woodworking, but after 2010 commissions began to dry up: the people were getting poorer. He abandoned his craft and started driving a cab.

In her own letters, Lyudmila describes her happy childhood in the Taiga, where she grew up in a small village of Russia’s far-eastern Khabarovsk region. When mentioning Khabarovsk, she passes greetings to her people, describing them as “brave and noble romantics” and urging those who might read her letter “not to leave their motherland till the end.” Her dream, Lyudmila writes, had been to become a costume designer. She showed her sketches to someone at the Moscow MKhAT theater company, but he wasn’t impressed. For a long time, Lyudmila’s life was taken over by family: as a military wife with a young child, she moved to Poland, to live at a Russian army base with her then-husband.

Lyudmila remembers Poland as clean, bright, and comfortable. Somehow, her stay in Poland made her embarrassed for her home country and the propaganda that continued to present Russia as Poland’s liberator. The Russians stationed at the army base drank, littered in the streets, and treated the locals with contempt. She was disillusioned, and divorced her husband later.

In 2018, she met Alexander. They began traveling, hiking, and camping together, and later moved in.

Lyudmila Razumova and Alexander Martynov

Photo courtesy of Lyudmila Razumova

Refusing to keep silent

With the arrest of the Khabarovsk Governor Sergey Furgal, the couple started discussing politics more often. Instead of photos and artwork, Lyudmila was often reposting Alexey Navalny’s investigations and interviews with opposition leaders on her social media. She openly criticized the government for its indifference to the country’s citizens, for destroying Russia’s barely nascent civil society, for annexing the Crimea, and for the war with Georgia. Alexander had been more reticent, but when Russia invaded Ukraine he couldn’t keep his views to himself, either.

The war thrust both of them into a state of shock. After spending the first day of the invasion in disbelief, they resolved to go to Moscow to take part in antiwar protests. No police force could possibly measure up to the number of people who would pour into the streets, they thought. But they soon realized their mistake. Lyudmila describes what she calls “one of the most dreadful scenes” she saw in her life: the empty carousels turning to the sound of a nostalgic song in the Red Square, while the police operatives shoved the protesters into the police buses standing ready.

Ballpoint drawing by Lyudmila Razumova

Photo courtesy of Lyudmila Razumova

Determined to open up the eyes of their own community, the couple began to come out at night and leave graffiti around town. They would pick the most visible landmarks, like shops and bus stops, and scrawl slogans in black spray-paint. A stencil they made looked like Putin and Hitler at once. Their last graffiti was an inscription on the pedestal under a Katyusha rocket launcher turned into a military monument. “Forgive us, Ukraine,” they scrawled on its pedestal, on the night before arrest.

Writing to Verstka from jail, Lyudmila explained the feelings behind those words: “I couldn’t eat or sleep thinking about soldiers on both sides, and that they were somebody’s children, born of someone’s labor pains and loved by their mothers.”

She had hated war since childhood. Her grandfather, Iosif Orlov, told the family about the battle of Dnipro that he took part in during World War II. As a commander, he did everything in his power not to lose any of his men, and succeeded. For the rest of his life, he received letters of gratitude from his men’s families, scattered around the Soviet Union, in Georgia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine. Lyudmila believes her grandfather would not have forgiven her if he were alive and she’d sided with those who invaded Ukraine.

Unlike the detective, who insisted that the phrase “Forgive us, Ukraine” desecrated a World War II monument, Lyudmila thinks of it as a message of repentance before the Ukrainian people, who had also done their part in defeating Nazism. The graffiti she and her husband spray-painted around their community was “a cry of shame and despair that couldn’t be expressed in any other way.” Lyudmila believes that “if all the Russians realized what kind of future awaits an aggressor country, they would have poured into the streets and city squares without fearing prison.”

The public defender

Alexander and Lyudmila spent a year in separate pretrial detention centers. For the first six months, Razumova writes from jail, confinement felt unbearable. As she adjusted to life in jail, solitude became its most painful part: although Lyudmila begged the staff for a cellmate, they said that, for her, a four-person cell would be an “impermissible luxury.”

Since no one outside helped the couple find a good attorney, they had to settle for state-appointed public defenders. Razumova’s lawyer, Natalia Gorozhankina (paid 200,000 rubles, or about $2,500, for the whole process) assured her client that she’d “get her a suspended sentence.” Lyudmila would later accuse her of dishonesty and incompetence. Gorozhankina, she says, ridiculed Lyudmila’s opinions and instructed her to look down, feign remorse, and lie about her health to get the court’s sympathy. By the time of her first allocution statement, Lyudmila had stopped listening to her lawyer’s advice.

Although the defender had drafted a speech for her, Lyudmila set those ready-made remarks aside and said to the court:

Putin is proud that our weapons are without equal in the world. Wouldn’t it be better to take pride in healthcare? Or in education, income levels, or pensions? We don’t even need them to be “without equal in the world” — it would be fine if they were merely adequate. But as of today, all we have is “greatness” — and a sea of vodka. Our “greatness” makes us proud, and vodka keeps our spirits high. The dissidents go to jail. People who still have an opinion have their lives broken.

Alexander, who only saw Lyudmila at the court hearings, thought she was out of her mind after spending so long in solitary confinement. He avoided political discussions with the judges, and Lyudmila’s abrupt refusal to demur about the war struck him as simply “catastrophic.”

Ballpoint drawing by Lyudmila Razumova

Photo courtesy of Lyudmila Razumova

The court was dragging its heels, admitting new witness testimonies and making the couple repeat their allocution statements. When this happened for the third time, Lyudmila refused to admit any guilt whatsoever. She began talking about a video published by Novaya Gazeta, a media source she trusted completely. “I don’t think that video was a fake,” she said;

I know a few things about video production. If I see Kharkiv that has been shelled from UAV altitude, what I see is Kharkiv after a shelling, no more and no less. I know very well the causes and the consequences of this war, and it frightens me as a woman and simply as a person, a free and honest person who knows that war is the worst thing ever invented by the humanity.

Disillusionment

By October, the couple began to drift apart. At each court hearing, Lyudmila spoke about the war, and Alexander tried to shush her. She took this as a betrayal. “The worst of all things that happened,” she writes from jail, “was seeing how weak was the man I’d counted on to be my strength.” Her feelings for him “burned up” in jail, she says, adding that it was probably for the best. As for Alexander, he thinks that Lyudmila’s political court speeches have only hurt them both.

In December, court bailiffs told Alexander that his mother had died. She had been his only living relation and the only person who brought parcels to him in jail. Meanwhile, Lyudmila’s own mother rejected her daughter’s political activism. Lyudmila’s ex-husband and their children write to Lyudmila and bring her parcels, but they never came to any of the trial hearings. Razumova’s youngest, 17-year-old daughter who lived with her and Alexander before their arrest, now lives with her father.

Unlike Lyudmila, Alexander followed his attorney’s advice, admitting his guilt and trying to impress it upon his wife that the court is no place for heroics. His reasoning was that they weren’t high-profile politicians but ordinary people, unprepared for long prison sentences. At 64, Alexander is convinced that he wouldn’t live to be free again if he went to a penal colony. During the earlier phases of their trial, he hoped that, after release, the two of them might leave the country together. Instead, their relationship fell apart.

At last, the court sentenced them to 6.5 and seven years in penal colonies. Although two OVD-Info specialist attorneys joined their case towards the end of their trial, the case was at that point beyond rescue. Alexander got the shorter sentence. Neither of them had been prepared for this outcome, but they accepted it as calmly as they could.

Hope and friendship

Solitary confinement leaves her very hungry for conversation, Razumova admits. When, because of media coverage of the case, new people began to write to her through the penal system’s correspondence system, she welcomed them as “kindred spirits.”

One of Razumova’s closest friends who now writes to her regularly is Andron Belkevich, an outdoors enthusiast who shares Lyudmila’s love of the Taiga but not her dissident views. Still, he found himself upset by the trial its outcome. He thinks of Lyudmila as a “creative person with an independent worldview, a strong and courageous woman, and an excellent mother.” “It isn’t that long since we became friends,” he told Verstka. “Lately, we corresponded more often and had been hoping to get together. It’s very bitter to see how it’s all turned out.”

Some of the people who help Lyudmila most are the prison staff. She believes that most of them work in the penal system because that’s the one way they can feed their families. In their eyes and faces, she says, she sees “solidarity and support that they cannot express in words.”

In a letter to Verstka, Lyudmila writes that she doesn’t despair and still believes in herself and in the strength of her own spirit. In spite of the verdict, she recalls, the process left her feeling triumphant, thanks to the new defense attorneys’ powerful closing statement that made the prosecution look “pathetic.” In her last allocution, Lyudmila said that, regardless of the time she might spend in prison, she had the advantage of knowing that her children, grandchildren, and their descendants “would never have to be ashamed of her.”

Judging by Alexander’s letter, he isn’t as high-spirited, but OVD-Info’s advocacy and letters that began pouring in thanks to the media coverage of his case have helped him look at the brighter side of things. Finishing a letter to Verstka shortly after hearing his sentence, Alexander quoted Vladimir Kara-Murza: “The dawn is very near.”

[orlando-in-love]

"He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive."

-Joseph Heller, Catch-22

[a-typical]

- Why me? - That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? - Yes. - Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why. ― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

[nerdby]

My current read is Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. It's listed on Goodreads list of Most Disturbing Books Ever Written, and I'm not that far into it but it seems pretty tame so far. Compared to other stuff I've read, but I suppose nothing really seems all that shocking after the rat scene in American Psycho (the book, not the movie). There's just no coming back from that shit.

[saa-na]

in the 1957 book manila rope by veijo meri we are living in the middle of the continuation war. the main character finds a lenght of rope on the road and decides to smuggle it home during his leave. he ties it around his stomach, under his uniform shirt. on the train back home his sweat saturates the rope and it tightens around his stomach painfully while the soldiers sit and share absurd stories about the war. the main character turns blue and looks unwell but is too scared to admit he is being squeezed alive by the rope. i never read the book but we were taught it as an example of early antiwar literature in school. this is what preparing for war (?) through learning to make rope reminds me of.

making rope is a valuable skill to have these days and you never know when you are going to need to make rope

[sarcastic-salem]

Whoa, hold up…..

People think The Hunger Games is a fucked up story about war? 🤣

Yall ain’t seen nothing yet. Peeps, I give you Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun.

This is an anti-war novel that was written in 1938, and it follows the story of WWI vet Joe Bonham. After awakening in a hospital, Joe finds that despite his mind working perfectly he is immobile due to injuries he suffered during the war. Unable to move or communicate with anyone, Joe is a prisoner in his own body.

The book won the National Book Award, and despite being regarded as one of the most horrific novels ever written it was made into an award winning movie in 1971.

If you wanna read a book about war, then you need to read this. Cause this is a book about war. Not Suzanne Collins’s Battle Royale fanfiction.

[prettybookishh]

Slaughterhouse-Five poster

[auskultu]

The Weekend Revolution

uncredited writer, Time, 3 May 1968

THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT by Norman Mailer. 288 pages. New American Library. $5.95.

Early in this book, the author reports that Poet Robert Lowell remarked to him: "Norman, I really think you are the best journalist in America." Mailer refused to take it as a compliment. "Well, Cal," he replied, "there are days when I think of myself as being the best writer in America."

Lowell was offering up the current intellectuals' line on Mailer, and Norman was mouthing the perennial Mailer line on himself ("Me Mailer. Me champ"). But The Armies of the Night suggests that Lowell is wrong, and that Mailer may be closer to the truth. He is a rather lazy and often sloppy journalist, but he can still write like a streak. Whether that makes him the best writer in America is open to question, but this book, which Mailer labels "History as a Novel" and "The Novel as History," is a bravura performance.

Buoyant Bending. Since the work had ample exposure in Harper's magazine and Commentary, it is widely known by now that this is Mailer's attempt to build a Washington monument by providing a step-by-step account of what in the present perspective seems like a decidedly minor news event: the peace march and militant demonstration in Washington last October. Mailer does indeed cover all the accepted journalistic steps, from the ceremonial handing-in of draft cards at the Department of Justice to the activists' vain roughhouse attempts to storm the Pentagon.

But more important is the omnipresent hand of a born novelist, buoyantly bending and shaping each scene to his literary way, and successfully creating a single, superb, comic figure of the author himself. With a courageous measure of self-mockery, Mailer casts himself in the role of a black-humor antihero: a hard-drinking, self-important and snobbish dandy who, believing himself the star, is forever stumbling toward the camera, when all the time he is really only an extra, a bit player who will inevitably be cut out of the film.

Bark & Bite. Mailer indulges his hero with a splendid deadpan pomposity, reinforced by the fact that he refers to himself throughout in the third person. The reader first meets him in his Brook lyn Heights apartment, picking up a ringing telephone as if it were a pistol loaded for Russian Roulette. "On impulse, thereby sharpening his instinct as a gambler, he took spot plunges: once in a while he would pick up his own phone. On this morning in September, 1967, he lost his bet." The caller is a militant antiwar organizer and old Harvard classmate, who extracts from Mailer a promise to participate in the Washington protests and thus give up a valuable weekend. The lost weekend really starts off when Norman, very much in his bourbon cups at a fund-raising evening in a theater, urinates on the floor of a darkened men's room. He then goes on to bully his fellow speakers with arrogant bluster and to bawdy his audience with testy obscenity—for which he offers a spirited defense. He uses it to wake up people, he claims. Besides, he discovered in the Army that it is the common man's humor and, in a way, the voice of his history ("the truth of the way it really felt over the years passed on a river of obscenity").

Mailer evokes some marvelously mordant closeups of his fellow "weekend revolutionaries" as they try to do their ritualistic protest thing quickly, so that they can get back to New York for a dinner party. "Lowell's shoulders had a slump," writes Mailer. "One did not achieve the languid grandeurs of that slouch in one generation—the grandsons of the first sons had best go through the best troughs in the best eating clubs at Harvard before anyone in the family could try for such elegant note." Ideologue Paul Goodman "looked like the sort of old con who had first gotten into trouble in the Y.M.C.A. and hadn't spoken to anyone since."

But Mailer always returns to himself. With an "egotism of curious disproportions," he catalogues his breakfast menus, his cures for the common cancers, even the virtues of each of his four wives. Sometimes he is the little boy full of comic-strip fantasies about riding around in a red helicopter, taking on the whole might of the U.S. Air Force and of "corporation-land" by shooting paint at the enemy choppers. At other times he fancies himself an exiled princeling (though from what country defies the imagination).

Often, he reveals himself as an archconservative who dislikes mass man and the whole modern era with its shoddy workmanship—one can almost see him in an English county seat decrying the servant problem and denouncing Labour amid outraged pipe smoke. He accurately describes himself as neo-Victorian in regard to sex; he speaks ill of homosexuality and masturbation, and proclaims that "without guilt, sex was meaningless." In fact, one sometimes wonders whether Mailer is not really an undercover agent of the old order, trying to undermine the Left from within.

Bellicose Charm. The Armies of the Night occasionally suffers from the languor that inevitably descends upon any one-character work. And it is not with out Mailer's usual excesses. He enjoys his own jokes too inordinately; he protests his right to protest too much, with some of the purplest prose apotheosizing America written since the rhetorical mauve of Thomas Wolfe ("Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . tender mysterious bitch"). For the most part, his genuine wit and bellicose charm, and his fervent and intense sense of legitimately caring, render The Armies of the Night an artful document, worthy to be judged as literature.

However, as journalism—which is history's fief in time—the book is another matter. Mailer is pretentious about Marxism. When he suggests that it would not really matter if all Asia went Communist, because expansion only creates problems for Communism, he is, at best, playful or naive. He brilliantly employs the suggestive, evocative devices of the new journalists—or old novelists. But he suggests too much, and evokes too wildly. He looks into the faces of the U.S. marshals and reads in them the notion that Viet Nam is where the "American small town" gets its "kicks." And he fails to note as a sound journalist would, that there were U.S. marshals just like these who escorted James Meredith through crowds of rednecks at the University of Mississippi. He also has visions of future concentration camps in America (with Muzak)—a fantasy worthy of a propagandist or novelist, but hardly a reporter.

In the past dozen years, Mailer has developed cop-out infatuation with amateur journalism. During that time he wrote only two interesting but indifferent novels, An American Dream and Why Are We in Viet Nam? Ernest Hemingway, Mailer's onetime hero, also engaged in journalism but noted that "it blunts the instrument you write with." It may be time for Mailer to heed that warning.