#omar bartov

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

[eretzyisrael]

[danceonthetide]

There are no antiwar war museums. If war could not make men turn against it, clean empty uniforms certainly cannot. At best, they will remind some of us of the sorrow and the pity of it all.

Omar Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, p. 157

[danceonthetide]

If the great cathedrals serve as the symbol of the secular power of Europe's spiritual institutions, the great war museums embody the sacralization of violence, the aestheticization of war, the glory of soldiering.

Omar Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, p. 154

[danceonthetide]

With the introduction of industrial killing to the battlefield, the systematic murders of whole peoples became both practical and thinkable: those who had experienced the former could imagine and plan, organize, and perpetrate the latter. All that was needed was the will to act, and by the end of the Great War there were not a few men who believed that their only escape from the hell of modern war was to subject others to the industrial killing they had barely survived.

Omar Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, p. 50

[danceonthetide]

Many feared the killing, others feared the intoxication; some could not have enough of both.

Omar Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, p. 44

[danceonthetide]

For what these distant descendants of medieval knighthood sensed was that the new weapons would make them redundant by putting an end to all individual heroism and character, and transforming the battlefield into a factory of death, where victory would be decided by the quality and quantity not of men, but of machines. The total stagnation of the Western Front during most of the war seemed to justify their fears. Personal valour vanished in the labyrinth of trenches, manoeuvre was blocked by the continuous front, generalship dwarfed by industrial mobilization. For the individual soldier, war became a lengthy wait for certain execution within the confined space of pre-dug graves.

Omar Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, p. 21

[danceonthetide]

The rank and file were necessary only to perform the real acts of war on the field; they had no share in the imaginary world that gave it all sense and meaning.

Omar Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, p. 20