[lit-ideas] Re: OT: online dictionaries
- From: Paul Stone <pas@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2004 16:12:55 -0400
At 03:59 PM 8/4/2004, you wrote:
>I'm not sure that 'Putsch' means 'an argument, spat, or disagreement,'
>which is
>what PS was looking for. It usually means 'coup,' as in the failed Putsch
>attempt in Austria in 1934.
>
>Waiting for correction from Mainz, I remain,
It does mean "coup" and that IS the word I was looking for. If anyone is
interested, the reason I asked is because I watched a movie called "The
Grey Zone" over the weekend. It was about a bunch of what were called
Kommandos at a group of 4 nazi death camps during WWII. Each group of
kommandos were Jews who operated the ovens and ran the gas chambers in
exchange for food/drink/comfort privileges and, in varying degrees,
approximately 4 extra months of life.
In any case, in one scene, a doctor (who was himself a compromised Jew
who assisted Dr. Mengele) was arguing with the director of the camp about
the Naziism and the commander was talking about the need for one race so
that there would be no more wars. The doctor replied, "but you already have
wars within your pure race". The commander said "those are not wars, they
are putsches" and goes on about the semantic difference and the reason that
there were two different words etc., but he never did SAY what the word
actually meant. All I could glean was that, in the commander's estimation,
a "putsch" was nowhere near as serious. I guess I was sort of right, but
not nearly.
This is ironic because a "coup" by the longest-living elite 12th Kommando
unit managed to rise up and destroy a lot of the crematoria and stick a
major wrench in the Nazi's plans for one of the most destructive of the camps.
Paul
##########
Paul Stone
pas@xxxxxxxx
Kingsville, ON, Canada
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