When I hear the term Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit. And when I hear the term "hi-tech" I think not of helpful androids efficiently performing household chores or light-speed rockets gliding seamlessly through space but of the fact that between 1933-45, modern technology was used to perform in ever more efficient ways the mass murder of six million of my people. The instruments of so-called progress, placed in the hands of the modern state, disappeared six million Jewish men, women and children, into a void from which they will never return and in which a majority of them remain forever unidentified. This was done in the name of progress by means of technology for the creation of a better world.
The Nazis often were, by their own lights, well-intentioned idealists working for a better tomorrow. And their instrument was modern technology, aspects of philosophical and aesthetic modernism and the old religious concept of supercession implicit in the Christian notion of progress. Jews were outmoded, useless, they said. Most high level Nazis, like Himmler or Heydrich or Eichmann, did not feel visceral hatred towards the Jew. Rather, they looked upon them coldly as something that simply needed to disappear so that the new life could get on its way. And the means by which they sought to do so was first through a propaganda campaign that portrayed Jews, in Wagnerian terms, as a drag on the visionary energies and bursting vigor of the new Aryan man, and then by the implementation of this decision to eliminate Jews through ever more sophisticated state corporate and scientific technological means. And yet, during the war crime trials at Nuremberg, while Nazi Jurisprudence was tried and hanged, Nazi technological attitudes were not put on trial.
The victorious Allies did not mandate that technology, which had been turned to such murderous ends, must pass an ethical standard review from an international body, like a UN of technology. No such body of decision came about. To the contrary, even while the war crime trials of Nazi chieftains were in session, American and Soviet governments were recruiting high-level Nazis to their intelligence services, military armaments industries, and space programs. So that, while in jurisprudence terms Nazi social and political values were delivered a blow, the Nazi fascination with technology merged seamlessly with that of their conquerors: us.
That is why today we drive Volkswagens, which were invented by Hitler, and use space heaters from companies that may once have manufactured crematoria and why Werner Von Braun, the Nazi father of the V-2 rocket became an American space pioneer hero studied in public schools. Nazi Technology and corporate methodology was folded handily into American feel-good Capitalist culture. That is the very point of the brilliant satire, "Dr. Strangelove".
So that now, sixty four years after the Holocaust, the Nazi disdain for the book has become the feel-good Hi-Tech campaign to rid the world of books in place of massive easily controlled centralized repositories of book texts downloadable on little hand-held devices and from which a text can be dissapeared with the click of a mouse: in Nazi terms, a dream come true.
How grave was Nazi contempt for books? As response to the book burnings in Germany, in the May 11, 1933 issue of Chicago's Daily Worker, (and years before the first fully operational death camps opened their furnace doors), a grim cartoon entitled "Altars of the Nazis" portrayed two smoking crematoria of equal size, placed side by side, one marked "Nazi Victims" and the other "Condemned Books". The link between contempt for books and mass murder could not be more clear.
President Roosevelt, recognizing the threat of Nazi attitudes to the book, launched a full-scale government campaign, and declaring it part of the national war effort, said: "...books...embody man's eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons."
In World War II, people died to produce and protect books. Anti-Fascist organizations, American Jewish Groups and writers, editors and journalists launched massive demonstrations in defense of the book, including, on March 10, 1933, the largest march, to that date, in the history of New York City: 100,000 people turned out to express outrage at the burning of books and other events in Germany. In its coverage of the Berlin book burnings, Newsweek used "Holocaust" as its headline.
Today's hi-tech propagandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form that society would be better off without. In its place, they want us to carry around the Uber-Kindle.
The hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas, where every examination of a text leaves behind a trail, a record, so that curiosity is also tinged with a sense of disquieting fear that some day someone in authority will know that one had read a particular book or essay. This death of intellectual privacy was also a dream of the Nazis. And when I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.
Rabbi David Wolpe: Holocausts, Miracles And Mysticism
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In fact, I've noticed that e-books stay in "print" much longer than print books. I have friends who've only been writing for ten years, and half their books are already out of print. So if we're to worry about some concentrat
This has to be the most ridiculous article and analogy I've ever read in my life. And I normally would debate intelligen
War correspond
"I loved the worn leather chairs and the smell of the books. I loved the oak tables, where I could spread out my books and think and read and write. I loved the windows where in the winter I could watch the snow fall gently on Harvard Yard.
"The study and understand
--Chris Hedges. New York Times Forum, May, 2003.
I am excited about the role our electronic media can play in preventing that “dangerous and frightenin
--Barbara Smith Stoff
HI-TECH TALIBAN by Alan Kaufman (Evergreen Review #121)
http://www
http://www
Hitler probably drank milk, drinking milk doesn't make me a Nazi, a Nazi sympathize
Yes, it will be easy to check what people have read, just like when you use a library card or a credit card.
If you are really concerned about your reading habits being monitored you have got to only buy books face to face and pay in cash.
The first one being the great potential in widespread
Another advantage would be for students and for university libraries : instead of fighting for the rental of a book on a specific subject which is owned by the library in only 3 or 4 exemplars for example, all students would be able to gain access it immediatel
Furthermor
It boils down to "The Nazis liked technology
It really sounds a lot like my old photograph
A few minor points:
1. Which is easier to hide from evil government
2. You can't stop it any more than horse lovers could stop automobile
3. Because the barriers to entry for authors will be lower, we'll see an explosion of new content unlike anything since the web was created. Everyone can be an author now, not just those that a few publishing houses and bookstores deem marketable
Hitler would have hated the Kindle because he couldn't control the content.
2. Yet equestrian
3. Convention
And Hitler would've loved the Kindle because its proprietar
Yes, this is true. An eBook can only run for 2 weeks without power. If society collapses or if you take a month-long hiking trip to a remote area, this could be an issue. There are solar chargers, but I don't know how well they work yet.
2. Equestrian
Yes, it exists. There will always be book collectors too. But most people don't use horses on a daily basis any more. There are far fewer tack shops around today than there were 100 years ago. Books aren't being BANNED -- they're just taking a new form.
3. eBook control
Amazon only controls the content that it puts on your Kindle. It does not delete content (PDF files, for example) that you put on it. I completely and utterly agree that we need to keep an eye on eBook manufactur
That's not to say that all of the issues have been resolved. The DRM issue still worries me. Publishers will want so much control over eBooks that they become more of a hassle than physical books. Piracy will be rampant if publishers charge too much. There could be format wars, upgrade problems, friends and family sharing issues, etc. But I suspect those problems will mostly work their way out soon.
http://www
Now I love books. I love their feel, their smell, and the sense of companions
On the other hand, technology is a tool that may be used for good or ill. I find it difficult to condemn it for its own sake alone, no matter who developed it or for what original purpose. All technology can and should be used for good. I don't think any legislativ
Yet, we see Orwellian "truthines
This could come in handy. Gee, if they can delete the book, they can modify some words maybe too. Only the careful reader is going to know the difference
You know this may all sound paranoid at first blush, but is it? Bezos decided to "change how we read", we have a right to consider the potential implicatio
Real books cannot be modified or deleted remotely. Some government
Physical books indeed cannot be modified remotely, but they also can't be copied easily, either, and they're difficult to store and preserve in adversity. How much easier would it be for us to know what happened in the past if the Dead Sea Scrolls had been, on, say, a hard disk in an anti-stati
Take a look at http://tvt
Shaver's Law #2 Change can be painful.
Shaver's Law #3 Those who fail to adapt to change fall by the wayside.
Shaver's Law #4 In the end we are all changed into dust.
Sturgeon's Law #1 Nothing is always absolutely so.
Sturgeon's Law #2 Ninety percent of everything is crap.
I think this whole topic is covered by Sturgeon's second law quite nicely.
OK, but I'm the son of a survicvor too and so just standing around and announcing that you take umbrage with my referencin
In fact, how can you can read my essay and come away with the impression that its exclulsive purpose is to use the Holocaust to cast a bad light on the e-book per se? If that is what you come away with, throw away youir mobile reader and start reading real books again because your comprehens
Obviously, my essay is an effort to t o show that when hi-tech engages in the widespread destructio
And indeed, before Hitler went after us Jews, he went after the book. Please reread my essay and reconsider