January 2012
Derrick Jensen: There’s this absolutely extraordinary book called The Nazi Doctors by Robert Jay Lifton, and in this book he describes how it was that men — people, but men in this case — who had taken the Hippocratic Oath could work in Nazi death camps. And what he found was that many of the doctors who worked in the death camps actually cared very deeply for the health of the inmates. And, you know, Mengele was, you know, horrible. But a lot of the sort of straight-line doctors were just — they would do whatever they could. They would give them an extra scrap of potato to eat or - the inmates. Or they would hide them from the selection officers who were going to kill them. Or they would -
Amy Goodman: To keep their experiments going?
Derrick Jensen: No, no, no. They would hide them from the selection officers who were going to kill them. They would do this to protect the inmate for that day. They would put them to bed, you know. They would actually do everything — if they were in pain, they would give them aspirin to lick. They would do what they could to help, except for the most important thing of all, which is they wouldn’t question the existence of the entire death camp itself. So they would find themselves working within the rules, however they could, to try to improve conditions marginally. And in retrospect, of course, that’s just not sufficient. And as a longtime activist, I see myself and other activists doing the same thing, that what we do is we do everything that is allowed by those in power to attempt to stop their destruction. But the problem is, whenever we figure out a way to use their rules to actually stop them, they change the rules.
Serenade
With my hand I gather this emptiness,
imponderable night, starry families
a chorus quieter than silence,
a sound of the moon, some secret, a triangle,
a chalk trapezoid.
It is the oceanic night, the third solitude,
a quivering that opens doors, wings,
the profound population that isn’t here
throbs overflowing the names of the estuary.
Night, name of the sea, fatherland, root,...
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electric iris / strawberry tongue
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