Total Domination                              

 

Date: July 14th, 2002

 

Location: 101 Water St. (rear); Vancouver, BC

 

Duration: 12 hours

 

Text: The Origins Of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

 

Pages: Chapter 12, Section 3; p.437-446

 

Lines: 368

 

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" It is not so much the barbed wire as the skillfully manufactured uneality of those whom it fences in that provokes such enormous cruelties and ultimately makes extermination look like a perfectly normal measure. Everything that was done in the camps is known to us from the world of perverse, malignant fantasies. The difficult thing to understand is that, like such fantasies, these gruesome crimes took place in a phantom world, which, however, has materialized, as it were, into a world which is complete with all sensual data of reality but lacks that structure of consequence and responsibility without which reality remains for us a mass of incomprehensible data. The result is that a place has been established where men can be tortured and slaughtered, and yet neither the tormentors nor the tormented, and least of all the outsider, can be aware that what is happening is anything more than a cruel game or an absurd dream."

 

                                               - Hannah Arendt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry is Disaster 
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