Word: reek
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Those who manage to escape could be models for Goya's Disasters of War. The lucky ones get into already overfilled tent camps that reek of caustic soda disinfectant and human excrement, and are ankle deep in filthy water from the first monsoons. Most huddle under trees or bushes trying to avoid the heavy rains. Some find cramped quarters on the verandas of now closed schoolhouses. Others near Calcutta have found large open drainpipes to live in. Around them is always the stench of garbage, polluted water, sickness and death...
...amusing side to the Nazis. He was an old-school Wilhelmist and a South German intellectual whose broad range of ideas included a distaste for modern mass man that could be traced through his friend Oswald Spengler and back to such Slavophiles as Dostoevsky and Danilevsky. Because of Reek's all-German background and community prestige, the Nazis appear to have tolerated a good deal of unsympathetic behavior from him. He invariably used the old greeting "God be praised" instead of "Heil Hitler." In 1940 he huffed out of a packed Berlin movie house during that famous newsreel...
...Reek's passionately conservative view, Germany's troubles were born with the spirit of nationalism spawned by Bismarck's victory in the Franco-Prussian War. It enabled the Prussian oligarchy and the rich northern manufacturers and bankers to force industrialization throughout a country whose spirit, Reck believed, was basically agricultural. This led to an erosion of pastoral values and encouraged the weedlike growth of indiscriminate commercialism and technology. The result was mass men who, in their confusion of broken values and deflated deutschmarks, accepted as real the fatal delusions of an irrational clown like Hitler...
...Reek's familiar and rather simplistic view of German history that compels the reader to keep turning the pages of his diary. It is his obsessive imagination of disaster, his specific visions of decay. Even in the mid-'30s, Reck saw Hitler as the culmination of an age of pseudorationalism that would destroy itself with its own greed, stupidity and madness. His pages are full of fleeting evidence: workers lined up in front of bordellos in broad daylight, language corrupted beyond nonsense, people bombed into insanity carrying their dead children in suitcases from city to city...
...often are constructed from sheets of rolled beer cans. One family lives with hundreds of Miller High Life emblems as the facade of its house, while a neighbor may prefer the hues of Pabst Blue Ribbon or Budweiser. Beneath many of these dwellings flow canals whose black waters reek of raw, pungent sewage. In the shacks, which have no electricity and little furniture, adults and children sleep side by side in a single room usually measuring no more than 8 ft. by 10 ft. Even so, they are lucky. Other residents of Saigon are forced to sleep on sidewalks, under...