Kristallnacht

Today marks 70 years since Kristallnacht, kicking off the wholesale murder, vandalism, and deportation of Europe's Jews. I hope that we as humans have advanced from that terrible point 25,550 days ago. I hope we have. I recommend viewing chief prosecutor for the US at Nuremberg Ben Ferencz's speech on inhumanity and war crimes. Here is a choice excerpt that I particularly like:

The most impressive thing to me at Nuremberg and in my other experiences in Germany was a complete absence of remorse on the part of the defendants. They argued that they were justified in doing what they did. The simple soldiers argued superiors' orders; the higher ups who were on the policy-making level argued that what they did was in self-defense - that they knew or feared that the Soviet Union was about to attack them and therefore they felt justified in a preemptive first strike. And the additional argument was then made, then why did they kill all the Jews? According to their own reports, they killed millions of Jews.

The trial in which I was the chief prosecutor against the special extermination squad, the lead defendant there was a general in the SS, Doctor Ohlendorf. He explained it very clearly: "We had to kill the Jews," he said, "because we knew that they were supportive of the Bolsheviks so therefore we had to kill them to eliminate any increased opposition to us." And why did you have to kill the children? "If we killed the parents, then the children would grow up to be enemies of Germany." Why did you kill the gypsies? "No one trusted the gypsies so we had to kill the gypsies as well." These arguments that supported justification of killing millions of human beings left me very, very cold. And they still do today.

To commemorate, I found a nice piece of atonal jazz, by Gary Lucas, that melds the sounds of Hatikva with Deutschland Uber Alles, combining the two with electronic shrieking and screams.

Verklarte Kristallnacht

Tani describes it as a combination of sculpture sound and musique concrete.