I love Eddie Izzard. Funniest 8 minutes ever.
”In the ’30s, Hitler: Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Second World War… Russian front not a good idea… Hitler never played Risk when he was a kid. Cause, you know, playing Risk, you could never hold on to Asia. That Asian-Eastern European area, you could never hold it, could you? Seven extra men at the beginning of every go, but you couldn’t fucking hold it. Australasia, that was the one. Australasia. All the purples. Get everyone on Papua New Guinea and just build up and build up…”
”Hitler ended up in a ditch covered in petrol on fire… so, that’s fun. I mean that’s funny. Because he was a mass-murdering fuck-head!”
”We stole countries! That’s how you build an empire. We stole countries with the cunning use of flags! Just sail halfway around the world, stick a flag in. “I claim India for Britain.” And they’re going, “You can’t claim us. We live here! There’s five hundred million of us.” “Do you have a flag?” “We don’t need a bloody flag, this is our country you bastard!” “No flag, no country! You can’t have one. That’s the rules… that… I’ve just made up!”
[Essay for HST 104 at ASU]
As Jan Kott introduces the book This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, he comes to a great realization. He writes, “There are years and places, sometimes whole decades and entire nations, in which history reveals its menace and destructive force with particular clarity. These are chosen nations, in the same sense in which the Bible calls the Jews a chosen people.” (Borowski, 12) For the purposes of the text he is introducing with this historical insight, this chosen time period is the late 1930s and the early 1940s. The chosen nations were to span nearly the entire European continent. As will become very evident upon examination of the text This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski, and the film Schindler’s List, during these times of “particular clarity” individuals find themselves in the middle of massive historic events; it is in these times that one comes to the realization that they are having an impact on history – either positively or negatively.
[Essay for HST104 at ASU, 1171 Word Count]
On December 10th, 1948, the United Nations adopted and proclaimed General Assembly resolution 217 A (III). This resolution is more commonly referred to as The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This resolution was so powerful that it was translated into over three hundred languages and called upon all member nations to “publicize the text of the Declaration and ‘to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories.” (“Universal Declaration of Human Rights”). This highly influential document, while published after much of the trauma experienced by James Yates and Olga Lengyel, still applies to their lives. This document serves to define the otherwise arbitrary term “human rights.” I will use this document to highlight the human rights abuses experienced by the two previously mentioned authors. For these purposes, I will cover examples of transgression of each article, in order, with the grouping of articles 1-11, 12-19, and 20-30.
| — | Tadeusz Borowski [in This Way to the Gas Chamber, Ladies and Gentlemen (his story of his survival of Auschwitz)] |
| — | Olga Lengyel (Five Chimneys, her story of Auschwitz) |
| — |
Tadeusz Borowski (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen - Auschwitz survivor’s story) |
And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. They will produce their own beauty, virtue, and truth. They will produce religion.
| — | Tadeusz Borowski (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen - Auschwitz survivor’s story) |
