as opposed to the civilized conduct exhibited by us troops in abu graib or the brits in malaysia or charlie company in my lai, not to mention certain devotees of beethoven, goethe, and nietzsche in some small polish villages and various tracts of western russia . . . . what makes you think that peasants have a monopoly on stupid, brutal, violence?
--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Chris quoted Dostoyevsky:
>
> > "Have you ever seen how a peasant beats his wife?
> I
> > have. He begins with a rope or a strap. Peasant
> life
> > is devoid of aesthetic pleasures -- music,
> theatres,
> > magazines; naturally this gap has to be filled
>
> Jerzy Kosinski paints a similar picture in his
> _Painted Bird_ ( I do not
> have a copy on me to quote some of the more juicy
> descriptions, e.g. that of
> a peasant gouging out the eyes of a guy who had hots
> for his wife and then
> methodically beating crap out of her). Kosinski has
> been accused of
> plagiarism, allright, but he plagiarized it from the
> Polish literature that
> provides many description of peasant violence (esp.
> the novel _Peasants_ by
> Wladyslaw Reymont) . Another example, Isaak
> Bashevis Singer (_The Magician
> of Lublin_) writes about peasants boiling alive a
> thief they caught, and his
> other novel _The Satan of Goray_ also contains many
> gory details (no pun
> intended, Goray is a Podunk in SE Poland) . The
> images of the 1840 revolt
> in which peasants cut their victims with saws are
> still alive in the
> literature and folklore.
>
> An then, there is the Jedwabne pogrom, described in
> gory details by Jan
> Gross in the New Yorker ....
>
> Perhaps some of it is exaggerated - but the peasant
> penchant for brutality
> and violence is well known and hardly contested.
>
> Wojtek
>
>
>
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