1944 1945
krieg krieg
krieg krieg
krieg krieg
krieg krieg
krieg mai
krieg
krieg
krieg
krieg
krieg
krieg
krieg
[internautica]
Tagged “war”
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Markierung einer Wende
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Running Orders
They call us now, before they drop the bombs. The phone rings and someone who knows my first name calls and says in perfect Arabic “This is David.” And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass-shattering symphonies still smashing around in my head I think, Do I know any Davids in Gaza? They call us now to say Run. You have 58 seconds from the end of this message. Your house is next. They think of it as some kind of war-time courtesy. It doesn’t matter that there is nowhere to run to. It means nothing that the borders are closed and your papers are worthless and mark you only for a life sentence in this prison by the sea and the alleyways are narrow and there are more human lives packed one against the other more than any other place on earth Just run. We aren’t trying to kill you. It doesn’t matter that you can’t call us back to tell us the people we claim to want aren’t in your house that there’s no one here except you and your children who were cheering for Argentina sharing the last loaf of bread for this week counting candles left in case the power goes out. It doesn’t matter that you have children. You live in the wrong place and now is your chance to run to nowhere. It doesn’t matter that 58 seconds isn’t long enough to find your wedding album or your son’s favorite blanket or your daughter’s almost completed college application or your shoes or to gather everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter what you had planned. It doesn’t matter who you are. Prove you’re human. Prove you stand on two legs. Run.
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Who remembers the Armenians?
I remember them
and I ride the nightmare bus with them
each night
and my coffee, this morning
I'm drinking it with themYou, murderer -
Who remembers you?
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I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad. Only the privileged - those with homes and food and the luxury of time in a home - are touched, moved, sometimes changed by literature. For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy. What do stars look like on a clear cold winter night, when your children are hungry, are daily losing their very health; or when, alone, you look up from a heat grate? Of course in cities at night you can’t even see the stars.
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HOW DO WE KILL CHILDREN
In Strategy Room #2 we had whiteboards going, big rolls of paper, Zoom calls to assistants out in the pool going nuts creating moodboards and decks and a bunch of kids coming up with prompts for AI pictures to see if any of it got the juices flowing and unblocked the dam creativity wise so we could ideally step outside our preconceived ideas of "good", etc. On the largest and most central whiteboard were big, glossy letters that spelled out "HOW DO WE KILL CHILDREN?" which, while abrupt and perhaps slightly untoward in its immediate implication, was easily contextualised. Easily. Firstly, they were big and glossy because we had had them printed, because we had originally written the question in pen which felt almost glib in an inappropriate way. "The optics," one of us, doesn't matter who, had sighed, considering the possibility of a leaked photo which painted us as flippant or dilettante or naive. So we replaced them with better letters. It was that simple. Secondly, the message deserved to be considered in the full context of history. Let's leave it at that. Plenty to work with there: just Google it! You'll be reading a while. Thirdly: once history's factored into the equation, the only remaining question is how you kill kids and get away with it. At the start of the session 8 months ago we'd been different-looking cats, believe me. Neat, kempt, sane. Now messy, unkempt - still sane! Still sane and looking the real world right in the eye. Now we were drinking coffee and ordering takeout poke bowls for, if not every meal, then most meals. Did we enjoy it no. Not at all. "Bombs", we'd underlined first. Run a cost benefit analysis and bombs are essentially free after adjustments. And boy do they kill a bunch of kids. We looked at the numbers on that and nearly took the afternoon off. But then someone - not naming names - pointed out that bombs are a little stinky, branding-wise. Bad optics on bombs, we all agreed, even if they were so cheap after adjustments - and so effective! And then we put "bombs" out to the focus groups and they came back "criminals", "murderers", "wrong", "evil". We wanted to shake these focus groupers by their collars and say what the HELL is wrong with you, do you know how harmful it is what you're putting down on these forms, have you ever seen the clean pure fire that is unleashed by a bomb at the moment of ignition? Do you know how ignorant it is - to say that LIGHT ITSELF is somehow EVIL? Crazy - so we said, hey, put bombs down anyway. So cheap when adjusted. And after that someone underlined "Guns", and again that had got us all going - "an unimpeachable good," someone had said, "just look at cops, quite literally the good guys - quite literally paid to be the good guys." And that had been a breakthrough. And someone else - and they said this in confidence, so don't ask - had said - "and the kids we're looking at killing - these are standard fit out kids? Like little, short, small muscles - kids?" And we went yep. One and the same. And then someone was like "Isn't it crazy that we're trying to kill as many of them as possible?", which was a real pinch-me moment. Like, yeah. Sort of crazy, but then they obviously needed to die, and that's why we were here - to focus on ideating and iterating and not getting our hearts and our heads mixed up. And then it was like the floodgates were open, and we were talking about airdropping poison toys, about thin wires stretched across alleyways at child neck height, about radioactive pellets to give them leukaemia. Couldn't have been more proud of the team. Shivers. We ran it all up the chain and the bigwigs told us "love the creativity, keep it coming, we're at bombs budget-wise" - so we sent bombs down to fulfilment. And the boys from fulfilment shipped 'em off and we stood around the warehouse with a glass of whatever and watched the sunset and someone said "The kids will die, right?" And we said sure. The kids are gonna die. Don't sweat it.