FROM OF THE CYCLE OF CHAPBOOKS #5
STANDING JUST OFF STAGE - The Road to Poland (Auschwitz)
If we do not Learn from History ...then we must repeat it Part One: Fascism in the 20th Century
In this issue of "In the Pureland of the Volcanos" this initial page introduction of the "background frame", that presence that lay behind the disparate daily events depicted in each collection, comes to the forefront and is the matter of the poems in the present collection. Just as volcanos, earthquakes, poverty and white supremacy lay in the background of life in Oregon, so too does the events of World War Two, the Fascism, the Death Camps and the devastation of wholesome life loom ancestral to what we in America might become. Just Chapbook teaches us a History Lesson, a History we didn’t want to repeat!
SOME SCENES FROM THE PURELAND OF THE VOLCANOES
A CHAPBOOK OF SOME SAMPLE POEMS
from the first part of the Poetry Cycle The Crowning Skull of Earth
Teacher: Today we will introduce an aspect of World War II that opens up on a whole world of its own, the Nazis, anti-Semitism and the concentration camps that became death camps by the end of the war. I want to see some hands on where you've already heard about this before.
Student: I read about that girl Anne Frank. She wrote a diary and then was taken away. All the girls in the class read it last year.
FROM THE PBS FRONTLINE SPECIAL REPORT
"The Page the Investigators found, what it reveals, why it may have been removed and are there still more materials out there that have been held back from Anne Frank's Diary?"
11/24/2023
ANNELIES *
Wednesday 2 Augustus 1944
Dearest Kitty,
it’s a new day
- as to what
I did yesterday
and what my dreams then had to say
will be our Topic for Today:
Bombs fell on our World
but kept away. (A girl
can only pray
it stays that way),
and as boys get taller
every day - (more
to be said on that I’m certain),
anyway,
with me still in some old stuff
while the SS parades
the Champs-Élysées *
I shall wear brave faces
for our fellow sardines
and the curves to come
to our troubled teens.
Every thing is same this day
as every other, but
each day might be a trap
not marked on the calendar.
So we rehearse our script
and walk narrow in our shoes
for each foot step out side
may be a footstep
come for you!
I hate when rumors
prove to be true, or when
Good News Comes Too Late
to do what Good News
was supposed to do!
Yours, Anne**
* Please reference It Happened In Paris: WWII Nazi Occupation ( 1942 & 1944) | British Pathé
https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=t1LdRmFZdnU
** On reading this poem after writing it I had the notion that this poem might serve as a support for discussions by an audience of teenagers. A Discussion Question: “What ‘Good News’ could be it that “didn’t do what it was supposed to do?”
THE JUNGMAEDEL GIRL
(pronounced: 'Yoong May Del')
Her blouse is white. Her skirt is blue,
a Jungmaedel Girl on her tummy
wolfing down raviolis
from a camping pan.
Her lips are red.
Her eyes are blue.
Her blonde braids
dangle like brushes
into the red sauce
- she has to
wring them out
with a finger
rubbed on a spoon.
A sweetsimple girl, her
eyes eye a dumpling
still left in the sauce.
Trained in
Mein Kampf and tennis
she will lay with soldiers
and give birth to soldiers.
She knows she’s pretty.
laying on the grass
as we pass.
A cherub of innocence
that knows she’s
enchanted us.
[ Heard everywhere in the streets during Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass in 1938 ]
“JOY IN CRUELTY” THE VICTORY ANTHEM OF THE DOGS (a Brown Shirt Song) Part 1
We like it because it’s FUN to be Cruel!
1.
[MALES repeat building to a Victory Crescendo when arriving at the rumble.]
What do we do, we feisty boys
marching in step
our Homeland to come
we boys of the banner
and men of the drum
with the asocial shits of
the RED 5th Column?
what is to be done?
what is to be done by
we boys of the banner
and men of the drum?
We beat our drum and cock our gun
da-dum-dee dum. da-dum-dee dum
we take to the streets and make them run
da-dum-dee dum, da-dum-dee dum
da-dum-dee dum, da-dum-dee dum.
the weak boys and the foreign scum,
the beaky Jew, the Banker scum?
Just fuck them! fuck them! [shouted with lust]
fuck the fucking lot of them! [shouted with lust]
da-dum-dee dum.
da-dum-dee dum.
2.
[FEMALES repeat as long as they are marching with the MEN]
hammer in hand
hand with hammer
brothers stand taller
shoulder to shoulder
shoulder to shoulder
boot to boot [EMPHATIC]
hammer in hand
hand with hammer
[slap truncheon on palm starting each line]
3.
[repeat the opening three stanzas stamping as if still marching when assembling for the CALL TO ACTION!]
Teacher: Where did fascism come from, who invented fascism?
Student: The Nazis! The Nazis invented fascism because they wanted to make their country strong, so they invented the idea of a Superman and believed most people were weak and needed to be told what to do.
SOME OLD FUCKER'S HISTORY LESSON FOR A PINT 1978
Old bloat Bob and the squat toad Ben,
they was floating in their beers about
having been
boys - and in the afterglow of Imperialism
that comes when such Old Sports grow old,
and the News is dim,
and the pads on the stools
seem to shrink and stick up
into their butts from
the weight of their sins.
LORD! Like old Pharaohs
tugging at their bandages
one-upping each other, (the
iguana-headed blue-collar men
chewing pig-knuckles all around them),
three centurion Veterans
with the voices of old women
start in with
(cackle one) "World War Two!"
(cackle two) "Now that was some serious shite shoveling."
(cackle three) "BOOM and Rat-a-Tat and all that scat!",
when one more upright Citizen
comes in, zipping up
from the alley, and chuckles,
pointing this way and that
with his chin,
and says "For an Imperial
Pint I will tell you
about the First Such Ugliness
from which the Nazis boosted
their FINEST Fascist Inventions!" And
SO, when the pouring was done
this telling began
"In the 2nd Oorlog War agin the Boer, bee'n
humanitarian, after razen the crops,
salt'n the wells, and kill'n
the men, the British began
cultivating the habit of the concentration
of children an' women into camps, removing them
to squaller an' deprivation where,
(coincidentally wit Ravensbrück), some 30,000 souls
suffered their expiration. i
You could say they died,
both widow and child,
(ten to a tent the size of the box
you could fit a piano or refrigerator in),
of the poor hospitality being showed 'em.
The Germans?
The Germans being the utter fuckers they were
• bought into ol' Henry Ford's daft
History of Semitism,ii
purchased a census o'Jews by IBM,iii and applied
the strategies of American Taylorismiv
to the mass production of death
by Industrialization out in Poland!
Whew! Let me tell you.
The Nazi Nation went out an'
goose-stepped the tally o' Jew kill'n up
to maybe 6 million men, womans and chill'n."
As this telling trails off,
the small talk stops,
each man, balks, blinking
into their reflection in the wet
o the counter-top, and then climbs off.
Each old man walks home
alone in his thoughts -
old coats,
old sofas,
old bachelors
- great wins and great losses
lost to all of them
when measured against SUCH
AWFUL DEEDS DONE
BY MEN TO WOMEN
AND CHILDREN. And then,
mounting the stairs, hard and cold,
open the doors to the rooms
they know they will one day die in.
Theirs is a month to month,
hand to mouth, descent into
being forgotten.
Forgotten already, but to their drinking
friends. Now I ask you,
when a genocide like the Armenians
by the Ottomans, all those poor Boer Women
and Children, or what those fastidious fascists,
the Germans did to Ravensbrück's
cadaverous stick-women, or even what our Heros
did to the innocents of Hiroshima
and the innocents of Nagasaki,
and those Hutu, what call possibly
did they have to butcher
half a million Tutsi?
All of these, (and all of those
just like them), are forgotten,
within just Three Generations doomed
to disappear from polite conversation -
what are we to think,
already forgotten just like them
head hung in the mirror, hands hung in the sink?
How many Names are remembered
by History, a few Thousand maybe?
I read there has been
ONE HUNDRED AND SIX BILLION,
SIX HUNDRED AND TWO MILLION,
SEVEN HUNDRED AND SEVEN THOUSAND,
SEVEN HUNDRED AND NINETY ONE
of us born Human since 50,000 B.C.. v
Most all of Humanity, (and this certainly
means you and me),
cease to count for anything different than Zero
in some bean-counter tally
at the Department of Homeland Security
and its 57 varieties of associated agencies,
long before we
sigh, and,
looking out at the darkness
beyond the liquor store neon,
stumble and tumble into
Infinity and cease
with the Greatest of our sins
and
the littlest of our fleas...
#
The Pith of MEIN KAMPF
You need to have a story a Man makes sense in.
A story in which a Man can win.
A story that accounts for both Us and Them.
A Tale that justifies our sins"
i 27,927 persons died in the camps, 1,676 men, mainly those too old to be on commando, 4,177 women and 22,074 children under sixteen. ", from Women & Children in White Concentration Camps during the Anglo-Boer War, 1900-1902
ii BLACK, Edwin. Nazi Nexus. Washington D.C.: Dialog Press, 2009. p. 6-9. This relationship has been common knowledge in Universities and unheard of in the general awareness in the USA, but unlike IBM, The Ford Company has owned up to the eccentricities of its founder, thus defending the memory of his genius.
iii BLACK, Edwin. IBM and the Holocaust. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002. This entire book in a profoundly researched inditement of this relationship, but most pertinent here, chapter three, "Identifying the Jews", p. 52-74
iv In the late 1800s, when the United States was reaching a crescendo in the Age of Industrialization, Frederick W. Taylor logically desired to transfer the design and work-flow concepts of industrial mechanical design and mass-production to the behavior of human beings, (workers), so their work-habits matched and better interfaced with a mechanized environment standardized to produce maximum efficiency in product output. A nightmare reflection of this 'scientific industrialization of human behavior' was applied to both the emergence of Nazi KL, (death camps), which manufactured human deaths, and to the exploitation of a slave labour maximized by a Satanic form of 'Scientific Management' in which calories were counted with the idea of maximizing labour until the worker succumbed to exposure, disease, or, to weak to work as expected, was put to death. The Nazis actually 'stumbled' into this inhuman approach to dehumanizing human beings driven by the social management emergency of killing millions of Jews. See WACHSMANN, Nicolaus.
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Girox, 2015, especially at the manner industrialization entered the camps with such contractors as Heinrich Kori GmbH and Topf & Sons, (p.225). If mass death is needed, scientific design principles are needed in its implementation, Form following Function, as it were.
v "107,602,707,791 people have been born since 50,000 B.C.." Population Reference Bureau estimate:http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx
